$5 PlanetScale is live | Hacker News Reader

$5 PlanetScale is live

planetscale.com

49 pointse2e426 comments

Hearing a $5 tier on planetscale was cool and I was thinking about using it for a future project, but those specs are just way too low to be worth it for $5/mo. I think I will just get a $5/mo vps with 32x the CPU (probably more as this is 2 x86 cpu cores vs 1/16 arm) and 8x the ram for the same price. The stats, insights and dashboards are cool, but for hobbyist projects that's too steep for the specs you get in my opinion.

5 bucks gets you 8gb ram 4 vcpu 75gb nvme at contabo actually

i know this is apples and oranges but that's 16 times the ram

you get all of those resources execpt what you need: a managed postgresql.

the difference in price is really the value added by having someone else managing postgresql for you.

what is there to manage on a single instance, single VM...

pitr, setting up a replica, observability, performance reports etc

I think in fairness it's an apples to oranges comparison.

How long will it take you to setup postgres on a VM and sort out and pay for somewhere to put backups? Let's say only a hour, and your time is worth say $30/hour you've just spent 6 months of planetscale fees and you've still got to pay your VPS and backup provider.

If you want apples to apples then Planetscale is compared to the ergonomics, pricing, and performance of the bests. If you want to compare you don’t analyze things in isolation by looking at your own expenses.

That's one way to look at it. I personally think it's worth burning a few hours to learn how to do something yourself even if you don't immediately get value out of it.

I already know how to do it, I just don't see the value in it.

Related: PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases (233 points, 16 days ago, 169 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45761027

Have we forgotten they promised free forever then flipped? I’ll pass on this, thanks.

But but the CEO was completely unaware of this until someone pointed it out to him recently! And they never could've predicted the free tier would be "unsustainable" after spending huge on "indie hacker influencer" marketing squarely aimed at exactly the type of dev to use only a free tier! These are some very hard calculations and unforeseen circumstances, please understand.

laughs bitterly in Heroku

I think this one’s from the CEO or an employee https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45767872

Wow what a rude behaviour. And yes he is the CEO according to his HN profile.

Thanks to 20 years of Google, we now have people believing something could really be free forever.

I guess it is also worth changing marketing tactics for new demographics.

Sometimes nothing is better than something. $5 for 512mb of RAM is something I regret witnessing.

1/16 of a CPU is admittedly more terrifying, I remember wayyy back in the days of shared hosting we didn't give less than 1/5th a CPU, we had all sorts of issues at absolutely anything higher than that.

is hosting a db really that difficult ? been doing that since college

put that on a hertzner, do, lightsail server etc n you have 16x of the compute at the same price n 8x the memory.

pgdumball etc, mysql is even easier but I don't use it.

Just yesterday I turned off the server for a pet project I had. Postgres had been running unattended for 7 years on Linode. pgdumpall to Backblaze B2 on a nightly crontab, that is it.

What is planetscale? A postgres PaaS?

They got big with mysql with optimizations (maybe mariadb?). neon would be postgres aas

Vitess (sharded MySQL) is how they became relevant. But broadly they've spent a lot of time making a great DaaS. There plan is to do the same with Postgres.

Can someone explain to me the neon pricing?

5 minutes of inactivity makes it idle.

If I get one query every 5 minutes and each query takes 100ms for whole month, do I get changed for 720 hours or for 14 minutes (total compute time)?

update: It's 720 hours of compute cost. Not really serverless. It's just managed database service and it can scale to zero. That's it.

What are the limitations of the $5 Postgres instances?

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