> > Benchmarks are done on a dual-core VM with "unlimited" IOPS
Unlimited is a feature here, no need to be snarky. They famously went against the accepted practice of separating storage from compute, and as a result, you reduce latency by an order of magnitude and get unlimited IOPS.
You do not get unlimited IOPS with any technology, but you especially do not get it in AWS, where the machines seem to be? Writing "unlimited" is completely unserious. If it's 67k read/33k write at 4k qd32 or something just say so. Or if you're actually getting full bandwidth to a disk with a 2 core VM (doubt), say 1.5M or whatever.
Unlimited in this context just means you're going to be CPU limited before you hit limits on IOPS. It'd be technically not possible to be bottlenecked on IOPS.
That might not be 100% true, but I've never seen a RDBMS be able to saturate IOPS on a local NVMe. It's some quite specialized software to leverage every ounce of IOPS without being CPU bottlenecked first. Postgres and MySQL are not it.
In addition to the point about performance Sam made, PlanetScale's Vitess (MySQL) offers out-of-the-box horizontal scalability, which means we can maintain extremely good performance as your dataset and QPS grows to a massive scale: https://planetscale.com/case-studies/cash-app. We will be bringing the same capability to Postgres later on.
Our uptime and reliability is also higher than what you might find elsewhere. It's not uncommon for companies paying lots of money to operate elsewhere to migrate to PlanetScale for that reason.
We're a serious database for serious businesses. If a business can't afford to spend $39/mo to try PlanetScale, they may be happier operating elsewhere until their business grows to a point where they are running into scaling and performance limits and can afford (or badly need, depending on the severity of those limits) to try us out.
businesses that 'need to haul ass' usually still want to try something out before buying it. That doesn't need to a a free plan, but it's common to offer some trial period to new users.
Also totally OK if planetscale doesn't do this and that $39/month _is_ the best way to try them out, I just think it would be good for them to make explicit in the article what I should do if I think I might want it but want to try it.
All our list prices are monthly and our bills are actually even finer-grained - there's no commitment to pay for a database longer than you run it.
If you do decide to operate on PlanetScale long-term, check out <https://planetscale.com/pricing> for consumption commitment discounting and other options that might make sense for your company.
> It's designed for businesses that need to haul ass
Could you elaborate what you meant by this for my education?