Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale
blog.opensecret.cloud
blog.opensecret.cloud
> - Usage-based pricing that punished our success, the more users chatted, the more we paid
This is such a strange position on usage-based pricing and seems telling.
If you're running databases continuously, I find a lot of their original unique selling point pretty moot, especially if you're paying them extra for it.
The bullet I quoted makes it seem like you feel punished for having to pay more because you used more resources. That's, like, the fundamental idea of usage-based pricing. If you feel punished, it seems as though you misunderstood the whole idea.
I'll reiterate that it's not the only reason why I'm moving off of them. Reliability, performance, insights, etc.
It just happens to be a lot more affordable too.
If you have a constant base load of requests, lambda is just the wrong tool for the job.
But I think for large workloads with unpredictable requirements, the capacity planning alone in a perm setup is a nightmare for most early-stage businesses. Spinning up an extra hundred instances in EC2 takes minutes - getting the same number of boxes installed a colocation facility takes weeks at best
Linear usage cost makes sense, but the more common/sane thing is cheaper unit pricing as you hit scale.
Depends on the provider's business model.
Many devtools want to make it trivial to get started, and zero/low prices facilitate that. They know that once you are set up with the tool, the barrier to moving is high. They also know that devs are tinkerers who may take a free product discovered on their free time and introduce it to a workplace who will pay for it.
But someone has to pay for all those free users/plans (they aren't using zero resources). With this business model, the payer is the person/org with some level of success who is forced up into a more expensive plan.
This is a valid strategy for two reasons:
- such users/orgs are less likely to move because they already have working code using the system and moving introduces risk
- if they have high levels of traffic, they may (not certainly, but may) be a profit making enterprise and will do the cold hard calculus of "it costs me $50/100 GB but would take a dev N hours to move and will have X opportunity cost" and decide to keep paying
The successful "labor of love" project is an unfortunate casualty.
The counter to that argument is that it's creating an adverse effect on your most profitable customers, with an incentive to move to offerings that don't have free tiers (or where the free tiers are not considerably affecting your own costs).
If your free tier is so lucrative that you need to 25x the cost, then your free tier is too expansive and you need to tone it down until the economics make sense.
> If your free tier is so lucrative that you need to 25x the cost, then your free tier is > too expansive and you need to tone it down until the economics make sense.
It does make sense, though. That's how almost every subsidized system works, and the benefit applies for everyone until they scale to a point where they are not legible for it. It does suck for the pool of people that just began paying the actual price of the service instead of the subsidized one, and certainly more so if they're not actually getting profit from it but then again, it isn't like they weren't benefitting from the price up to that point, otherwise they wouldn't have chosen it. Luckily enough, as far as databases go, there's a gazillion options to choose from and experiences like this are invaluable when it comes to picking one with a pricing model that fits the scaling requirements of a given project, and not only the technical merits.
Also as a side rant, I honestly don't think "projects of love" are a good counter argument to anything. They're clearly not of love because otherwise they would find a way to make them profitable. Most people are either lazy to, or lack the knowledge of how to turn their hobby into a marketable thing. Which is fine, nobody wants to deal with business when it comes to their hobbies, but one can't have it both ways. Either your hobby project gets successful and you find ways to cover its expenses, or you realize that your hobby project needs to be kept just a hobby project.
I appreciate the... tough love here, and also acknowledge that 'doing it for love' is ambiguous. But I strongly disagree that declining to make something profitable indicates that it's not out of love.
To clarify my own situation, it's more out of wanting to share knowledge with the world and build a community. It's a very popular site, ubiquitous in its niche, but that's about as much as I'll divulge.
I'll grant that we've been benefitting from the subsidy/hook up to now. But I'll also add the wrinkle that a substantial increase in bandwidth is due to AI harvesters. They are becoming an existential threat to projects like these.
Hmmm. I looked at one site with a fair amount of traffic that I have access to and the user agents that identified as AI crawlers were not significant in terms of traffic. Low single digits.
Curious what percentage of AI crawlers your site is seeing?
This sucks major donkey dick and I can't think of a single dev who would actually want this.
And companies keep offering them.
The ones that don't make waves because of how unusual they are (see Planetscale and this discussion: https://scalingdevtools.com/podcast/episodes/sam-lambert-ceo... )
I don't know about you, but I make many choices every day that are sub-optimal when viewed globally (or even across my life) but "make sense" or that I want to do in the moment. I suspect that is the cause.
Yeah, because devs are stupid. Because consumers, as a whole, are stupid. They're short-sighted and self-destructive. Just ask Marlboro.
> I don't know about you, but I make many choices every day that are sub-optimal when viewed globally (or even across my life) but "make sense" or that I want to do in the moment.
Yes, this is a fundamental character flaw present in every human, to varying degrees. Its a function of how our reward center works.
Exploiting that flaw for money-making is a dark pattern at best, and a crime against humanity at worst.
This right here is just a dark pattern. Using a vulnerability in the human mind for an exploit that, on average, extracts cash you wouldn't otherwise get.
Personally, I don't think it's that bad. But it is a dark pattern and I don't like it. So, there.
I think the only reason to go with usage-based pricing is if you want to take a risk to save money - you are getting unpredictable bills but hope that average is going to be cheaper. As any gamble, you can win or lose.
And Neon will be lowering prices dramatically... a day from now?
And 250 dollars/month was considered expensive for the infrastructure handling that? My first impression is that based on the stakes alone, that would warrant a full time dedicated engineer.
Not gonna lie, although I appreciate the comparison and that they shared their experience publicly, this post sounds like half a technical write-up, half an ad for both companies.
No, it was not my intention for price to be the main thing people hooked in on with this article. It's the combination of it all. Better reliability, performance, and infrastructure AND it's more affordable.
> warrant a full time dedicated engineer
TBH, it's basically my sole full time job as the CTO.
> half a technical write-up, half an ad for both companies
I've been frustrated by Neon for months now and excited about PlanetScale's new postgres offering. Was pleasantly surprised by it too and wanted to write about it. I do appreciate you writing this and sorry if it comes up too much like an ad for us. Only meant to share our unique experiences and satisfaction with a new thing.
Initial results are actually pretty cool when using the UI to spin it up. The API leaves some things to be desired (bad error messages that obfuscate the actual error, undocumented rate limiting, ..).
Plus, there's been quite a number of strange bugs we ran into, like tables that don't recreate correctly because of dangling resources.
Overall, I'm pretty excited about the product because it makes life a bit easier, but it's not really 'production quality yet'.
(Alternatively, maybe we're just doing things in a bad way while we're learning to use it, so it could be a PEBKAC type of issue, rather than a Lakebase issue).
Quote from the article:
> At $250/month for 4 databases without any replicas, we were paying premium prices for subpar reliability.
Way too much for a project without a budget, and approximately zero for a project with a budget.
Here's their announcement blog post with a bit more info, like their benchmarks:
Usage based pricing typically implies paying per number of requests.
But I for one see zero acronyms on their managed postgres product information page: https://fly.io/docs/mpg/ *
* Except in the url