PlanetScale is locking people out of their free databases

Twitter is now a mess of “Something went wrong. Try reloading.”. It’s seriously annoying.

On a more relevant note, this is why you don’t use free tiers on essential work. Free tier should mean free trial to see for yourself whether you’d be willing to pay for the service. No free lunch

That 3-step pattern is common, but it's not much better for paid products nowadays (e.g., the Garmin/Navionics purchase):

1. Pay for lifetime license for offline product.

2. "Offline" product has a backdoor and is remotely updated.

3. Continued use requires a subscription. No features were added. Some were removed.

4. PR spins this as for your own benefit.

5. Parent company gives all the liabilities away to a subsidiary in another country who can go bankrupt to make legal recourse more difficult.

And a million other variations. My go-to strategy has been reducing the surface are of entities who could exert influence if (when) they turned evil, not using some otherwise excellent products as one particular sub-strategy, but that only goes so far. What do y'all do?

I was a big of PlanetScale and I don’t dislike them now but I also don’t use them any more. Part of my issues were due to the limitations (1 db per cluster) but I also was frustrated with things like moving from “pay $30/mo + usage, we will handle auto-scaling” to “well $30/mo is for low traffic websites, pay us based on cluster size, no more auto-scaling”.

Additionally they introduced the concept of DB sleeping, something they touted at a feature (no sleeping for branches). I guess I understand, they want to save some costs but they advertised no sleeping then changed the policy. Almost more annoyingly, you must go to the console (or maybe the API) to wake your DB, there is no auto-waking. And waking up the DB takes a good minute or two+.

I ended up switching to Neon, mostly because I could run multiple DBs on the same cluster which is important for my use case. Neon raised their prices and also changed how they charge after I switched which is annoying but still cheaper than PlanetScale. Also their DBs wake in <1s in every test I’ve done.

Again, I don’t hate PlanetScale, it just started to change into something that didn’t work as well for me, I wish them the best of luck.

So we don't have the full context here. Is the customer in a specific country that has weird compliance issues they don't want to deal with for a free user?

I don't like the headline. It seems people from certain countries loss access to their Free account.

I am more interested as to why they don't offer certain services in certain country.

"database is sleeping" is an odd way to spell "database being held hostage".