Ouch. This pricing is pretty rough for SaaS sold on the premise of cloud scalability.

At $200/month for the entry level, their lowest price is many times what the cheapest geo-replicated "SQL engine as a service" from Google or Microsoft is. I'm not sure how the performance differs, but I am guessing theirs are no slouches.

Microsoft offers "SQL Database" geo-replicated for as low as $15/mo., and it scales up from there. Not sure about performance, but it would be apples to oranges (MySQL versus SQL Server) and difficult to compare. I wonder what the TPC numbers are, but apparently the TPC organization doesn't allow publishing that yet.

Google offers "Google Cloud SQL", also geo-replicated, and their cheapest pricing is between $10 and $18 dollars a month.