PlanetScale performs layoff and prioritizes profitability | Hacker News Reader

PlanetScale performs layoff and prioritizes profitability

planetscale.com

108 pointsflybayer49 comments

PlanetScale has been two products in one. It was born at Youtube as MySQL sharding solution for massive scale. In the last few years though it was adding features usable for developers on the small scale too, who do not need sharding but looking for database with better developer experience than MySQL.

I wonder if this change signals it is "Database for Large amount of Data" is what drives most of business. Companies who have 10TB+ database size, where Sharding is of real value will not think twice about paying $40 to do initial testing on paid account.

> I wonder if this change signals it is "Database for Large amount of Data" is what drives most of business

Hasn't this always been the case?

I think so. However it looks to me Plannetscale tried to also become better database for developers... for databases big and small and utililize developer focused product lead growth.

Cost may not be an obstacle, but process is. For some companies, getting approval to do that won't be easy. When services have free tiers, people can try them out as individuals before they go on to champion the case for using that tool at work.

A free trial can also work here, but the really short ones don't work well. It's not reasonable to expect people to devote all their attention to evaluating your service. It may take a few weeks or even a month to rack up just a couple hours of trying something out.

Could also be plumping the turkey for sale.. ..who cares about sales and marketing if you’re just worried about cooking the books now and not the long term. Might also explain why there’s the overly rushed 1 month deadline (which is the bit I’ve found hardest to swallow).

As a user of the free tier, the short deadline has really soured my view of the company - I would have transitioned to a paid tier sometime down the line, but that’s not going to happen now. It’s fine if they don’t want to focus on me as a customer. But the tech world is small, I might end up being a decision maker in a tech company with a vldb requirement, is my opinion of planetscale going to be bias because of this now - absolutely.

But either way who cares about the long term if you’re just making yourself pretty in the shop window?

Its interesting the contrast between HN and X [0] as far as the sentiment goes on this change. On HN seems mainly in favor of this change while on X everyone is mainly against it.

Personally, I'm glad I haven't built something on PS Hobby that I have to migrate but I do think its fair to charge for your product.

[0] https://twitter.com/PlanetScale/status/1765438197981708684

The people against this on X are probably not building a business. They wouldn't be giving PlanetScale money anytime soon.

I don’t fall out with the change at all, but being given 1 month to migrate doesn’t seem well thought out, there will definitely be some avoidable negative sentiment related to that.

These are potential paying users not freeloaders to evict.

This is the only real problem I have with how they handled the situation. But it's a big problem.

Whether or not these folks on free plans are ever going to convert to paid, they trusted PlanetScale to serve as a critical building block for their project/business. I think the least they could do is ease the transition by offering them a reasonable amount of time to offboard.

I personally would never trust critical infra to a company that has ever abruptly terminated a product offering with only 1 month notice.

How many months is to be expected by industry standards?

The mental model that you get critical infra for free is wrong.

Come on. Its a free offering. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for!

Does that just make this an echo chamber?

With news like these, I always take the lesson: Nothing free lasts forever. If you are not paying for the product, the product doesn't last for you. You will have to migrate or pay eventually. They don't owe you anything if you don't pay.

This seems like a smart move. I know some will be frustrated with losing a free tier. But ultimately businesses need to make money and charging for it is part of that.

> ultimately businesses need to make money and charging for it is part of that.

This is a mentality shift from the investor side. You would be shot down if you said we're focusing on profits/revenue rather than growth from 2010 to 2021. Now it's shifted from growth to profitability.

A bunch of companies were burning money rather than making it for a decade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo (nsfw language)

Silicon Valley was a documentary

Welcome to the world of European VC's where it has always been like that!

When you are a product that people build businesses on top of and start by burning money to grow as fast as possible and then switch to caring about profitability with a months notice to your customers that's a shitty thing to do.

They're doing the right thing. It's a killer business but this isn't 2020 ZIRP. If a company isn't profitable, it's not going to inspire trust, and this will hinder its growth and cost it deals. In addition to the tough VC market. At 39$/m, PlanetScale is a no brainer. Anyone with any clue will use this platform to build, and with these changes there's no doubt as to whether they will be there in 2y or not.

Again I don’t fall out with the changes, but your statement “If a company isn't profitable, it's not going to inspire trust” is pretty nonsensical - have a dig into that, clearly you’ll be surprised..

Don't you work for Planetscale? Why are you saying "they"? Were you affected by the layoffs?

I wrote "they" because I don't work there anymore.

For those looking for alternatives check out https://neon.tech/, https://turso.tech/ and https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/.

CockroachDB is another good one too

I use supabase, it's great

Well written, Sam - I admire the clear communication and transparent reasoning laid out in the post. I'm sure this decision took endless reflection and consideration; I'm happy for you that the announcement seems well received so far.

#planetscale_forever

"Removing sales and marketing" - That seems like an interesting decision unless those positions only existed to grow the free hobby tier.

I honestly missed the mention of layoffs..

Yea this seems like a gift for https://neon.tech/, https://turso.tech/ and https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/.

Planetscale is definitely popular and they get a lot of free advertisement from tech influencers (may change without the free tier) but most people I know in enterprise haven't heard of it.

When is a gift not a gift?

This is a particularly clever post.

For those that don’t have experience running companies with permissive free tiers, free tiers often act as a honeypot for a certain category of users that (1) don’t and will never pay for your product, (2) complain loudly and often and (3) eat up your support time.

This category of user is equally toxic to any competitor’s platform. The best B2B companies paywall early and set the bar high.

I'm curious if this was after a failed funding attempt. I think we're going to see a lot more VC backed companies prioritizing profitability.

I think startups should use seed rounds to become profitable. It's the only way to secure your future. You can be profitable and grow fast. See Notion and Linear.

I can confirm this is not because of a failed funding attempt. This is the most responsible thing we can do as an infrastructure provider.

Good to know, I fully support it!

There is no shame in charging for a product and changing strategy. Best wishes for success.

Tough decisions for a tough context. Planetscale remains the best tool in my toolbox when I'm launching online systems. Hang in there guys. You're doing valuable work. Enabling developers to help the world is a great way to rise a tide for everyone.

If you are interested we wrote about our experiences with PlanetScale here: https://gridpanel.net/blog/why-planetscale-broke-our-trust

I honestly believe removing the Hobby plan to be a huge mistake on the long-term, while optimizing for short-term profitability.

Without any inside knowledge, I can only speculate, and who knows, maybe PlanetScale wouldn’t have been able to continue as a business, if they kept serving the Hobby plan

What I am quite certain of though, is that PlanetScale is far from ubiquitous enough to have people take a bet on a service they’ve never tried, without a way to try it risk-free first

It’s a competitive space, and killing your funnel of “Engineers learning technologies as a side-project, and bringing they tech into their day job” seems to me at least to be very shortsighted

Most of the "free" things out there could only be sustained by the near-free money that companies could get in the recent low interest rate environment. Many companies ultimately had unrealistic business models, creating massive distortions in the marketplace and hurting companies and people who were trying to create actual, long term value.

Firing sales and marketing and getting rid of the free tier. How are they planning to find new customers?

If they're killing it, then it likely wasn't worth the customers who did convert to paying.

I support this. There's no way to run a business while giving away your product

I don’t think I understand the logic behind laying off sales while emphasizing profitability as the reason. Without sales teams how will the product make money? Is the idea that the company has enough existing enterprise customers? Or customers are flocking to the product organically?

Overall I think this announcement leads to more questions.

Similar strategy to Broadcom with VMware. Free products apparently don’t convert well enough to justify.

Tough choices. o7 to the laid off.

Going full enterprise by shutting down hobby plans while laying off primarily sales and marketing.

I think this is very common playbook those days - Overdeliver to your customers whenever with Free Tier, Everything Open Source, Extremely Low Prices to get market share... when do a switch and focus on profitability.

With killing free tier I wonder if it just was not generating a good conversion to paid users or is it killing a golden goose to get one time customer injection from folks choosing to move to paid tier

This was not a move out of a playbook. It's an incredibly thought out decision that comes from incrementally trying new things, seeing if they work, and constantly adjusting and making decisions that keep PlanetScale running.

At the end of the day, it's not cheap (and certainly not free) to maintain databases and infrastructure, especially with the additional features PlanetScale has.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com