Remember when they shafted the free plan, laid off some good people and redesigned their website to look like some garish notepad? Pepperidge Farm remembers...
I remember. It was a very painful moment for everyone involved. I still miss the people who aren't here anymore. I am not happy that it happened but I am also I am very glad to be at a profitable company. I get to work at a company that is growing sustainably surrounded by people I admire. I love our customers and I think in the long run people will root for a company that isn't just lighting money on fire at the alter of fake growth.
Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
> Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
it does feel to me that one way to demonstrate that is to not get pissy on hackernews. i know you’re in founder mode or whatever but this comment is the thing i’m now going to remember you for
You stated you don't care what I think. Just wanted to say though that i've admired you and your company for a long time. I participated in user interviews so I could score one of your famous hats. I submitted copious feedback. I was an evangelist for branching workflows and recommended several colleagues to your product. I watched all the talks, interviews and devrel videos.
I'm glad you are doing better now as a company, but as naive as it may be, I guess I would love to see an example of a company that consistently put people over profits, that is all
If a business does not run at a profit, it folds, and all the people there lose out.
Now, of course, the scale of the profit is worth discussing. The use of the profit is worth discussing. But in general terms some profit is necessary.
For example, I bootstraped a business from 0 to 50 people. We took no outside investment. We "paid" for the growth using profits. Our working capital, cash reserves, stock, equipment, vehicles etc, all come out of profits.
Yes, over the years, there have been things that didn't work out. People who ended up surplus to requirements. People not suited to the role they were in. Most left amicably. Some were pushed. None of that was easy but it was necessary because just keeping unproductive (or worse, divisive) people around is bad for everyone.
Running a business is hard. Firing people is hard. Comments like "people over profits" are flippant, but miss the underlying realities small businesses face all the time.
Yes, there are large tech businesses out there with bottomless pockets, who hire (and fire) by the thousands. But surely those bring hired in cohorts that big understand that a wind blows both ways.
It's not necessarily helpful though to apply your feelings about that to all the businesses that are not that.
I have immense respect for you building a profitable bootstrapped business. We raised venture to do this, I can't imagine bootstrapping. People are upset that I said I don't care what he thinks and maybe I was harsh but honestly people who have never tried doing this are always the ones to take shots, you basically can't care.
I am wondering about one thing though. I would also wish to do things bootstrapped if possible if I ever do anything but I just have some questions that might sound stupid but alright
How do you actually sell stuff on the internet with a price?
I will admit, free stuff are easy to sell... because they are free. But once you remove the free stuff, it becomes a scar easy to tell in the future, is the answer always having the paid stuff or somehow limiting who gets the free stuff.
Like as I wrote in another comment, I like fly.io's free model of some credits per month with credit card, I mean, I don't like them taking credit card but if that's what prevents them from spam, I would still consider it decent enough
But I have read some places where saying things like asking for a credit card would drive away most users, and even asking for mail for sign up sometimes really
As such the world has transitioned into something which runs via the ad model as people in some HN thread long ago basically summed it upto, it was evolution of sorts
Yet, I am on HackerNews, I care about privacy. I would feel the largest double-speak if my software got ads, at that point, I would just release it for free but that would make me no money, maybe even cost me some money, making it unsustaianable
I am not sure about the reality of things but I am a pretty frugal guy, so naturally its really hard for me to expect people to buy stuff, let alone the stuff I make/hack.
I could try to open source any stuff I build, but at that point, what is the matter of that aside from getting some stars/internet points, don't get me wrong I love the philosophy of open source yet I feel like its very hard for me to actually generate money out of it
I love building simple things I guess, My projects ideally would be a simple golang binary maybe with postgres but sqlite's cool too, and I don't want to make it too hard to install unintentionally to trap people to my cloud or whatever really
I am asking because I feel like I can't go from 0 to 0 (employing even myself) and I feel like playing the growth game could be good but sooner or later, I would find myself in the same position as planetscale in that sense and I don't want it really, and I personally feel like my work can survive without VC funding as well. SO I genuinely don't know how I will get money from projects
My projects are niche as well, most of them aren't for profitability but rather to learn. I personally feel like I might be a good guy to do a job and to do these things as random projects to increase my portfolio and if luck strikes then that could be good I suppose.
I don't even expect someone to donate to my github if I ever create a project. Low confidence maybe, I am not sure. I have seen so many cool github projects that have gotten stars but not donations. I would love to donate to them, but personally I am frugal, I don't want it as a shield but I am opening up that shield and wanting to donate to open source. In fact if I make money through such any projects, I will try to actually donate to open source in the process as well.
So my question to you is: How? You guys make it feel so simple having people pay , There was the 4 hour work week which sort of suggested-ish building plugins for things etc. and I did calculation for it to actually make me "free" and I don't know but having 1000 people buy even 5$ personally a month would feel huge. but I am not sure as my frugality makes me believe everyone is like me and so why would they give me 5$ when they could do what I did or use some open source software with just some differences really.
Don't pretend you were doing anything but trolling with a comment like "Remember when they shafted the free plan, laid off some good people and redesigned their website to look like some garish notepad? Pepperidge Farm remembers..." if you liked the company or product so much why would you take shots like that? if you had emailed me at any point and told me you had done this stuff i would have just given you a load of free credits. i do it all the time.
Last sentence completely undercuts the other sentiments you shared in your comment… probably best to cut stuff like that out in the future IMHO, even if it’s how you feel.
> Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
If you took your time to write it, you do care or if you genuinely don't, then people would now take it as a challenge to make you care...
This is just not good light. not all attention is created equal. This will hurt your company and your image.
Please, try to apologize to them if possible
I thought about it as an exercise as to what I thought your should last comment should be, it took some time but here it is
Hey, its great that you remember, it means that you cared about planetscale and somehow we were forced between false growth and real harsh truth and we wanted to present the truth, sorry if it had impacted any of your services. I know maybe I can't do much about how you can feel now about me or the company but I genuinely hope no matter what solution you might use now, you succeed in it with great success .If you feel like it, maybe give us another try but hey no pressure and as always, have a nice day :)
This took some time personally, especially after the part I genuinely hope no matter what solution personally but it didn't take more than 5 minutes to draft the whole response really.
Being kind helps. Atleast that's my philosphy or I would like to present it as such, I feel as if we are more common than different and basic human kindness resonates with that.
I hope you become the company seeking people's satisfaction first and absolute profits later but maybe that's an ideal. Just be honest with a bit of kindness and humility as there would be grace in it.
Honestly, my suggestion is to create something similar to fly.io really, have a 5$ free credit system but which requires credit card when signing up. It should prevent you from spams and if need be, try to limit it and try to do some excessive bot clearing
Maybe if you feel like you can have 5000$ for free without much compensation, then have limited (maybe verified?) people join in it for free with just credit card
Have some good restrictions on free license really, and although I haven't used fly.io as even the credit card got way too much of a requirement for me personally but,I would still look into what/how they are doing/implementing it
Taking some VPN as cautions plus taking note of suspicious activities from IP etc. comes to my mind as well if you go through this route. I think that you can genuinely create a good way to move some people as well or keep a free service while restricting it heavily really
Personally I wouldn't be able to afford the 5$ thing as well for just starting it out, I mean I haven't paid for any subscription ever on internet.
I am not sure what you are going to do or how you are going to pan out and take my suggestions lightly if need be, but please improve the tones and genuinely apologize to them if possible.
I don't know much about founder mode as other commentors point it out. I just think that your comment was a little bit rude and there were ways to make it better really
I'm surprised so many replies here are about removing a free tier 2 years ago. Things cost money, what did you expect? Whenever I get free products that cost money I expect it's either temporary, or I'm being the product myself.
If somebody built a service to try out planetscale or the fact that planetscale was constantly hyped around / sponsored some big names atleast in the youtube scale, I am pretty sure that some people went there thinking about the free forever and everything...
I do think it was a little bad move because now you can't even test planetscale and the memories of its free stuff still might haunt some people
Were we supposed to just keep it up until we go out of business or something? Out of sheer duty. Like burn everything we built to the ground to keep the free tier going as long as possible? Endlessly indentured to provide a free service on the internet for people that will never pay us money so that the people that do pay us money can eventually have to move provider too because we are shutting down?
I didn't enjoy doing it. I felt bad but I don't regret it at all.
I wonder why other providers don't use metal ssd sync replication technique that planetscale uses? Most of them just default to EBS.
My interest in it peaked when I heard about NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe/TCP) and SPDK from Xata[1] and apparently with that performance is as good as planetscale metal, but planetscale found their methodology flawed[2] and they Xata never responded.
Back then I was sure it was only a matter of time for other hosted database providers to move on from EBS.
But until Planetscale made a lot of noise about Metal no one seemed to bother.
@samlambert what exactly makes it hard? Isn't it as simple as setting synchronous_commit=remote_apply or does planetscale have a custom strategy or are there other operational issues?
Just asking since I find it both the planetscale's engineering and its impact on competitive landscape very interesting.
you have to make sure you will never terminate these nodes, that you have all the operations maturity to cycle them responsibly, and resize them. I am sure they will get there one day but most people are still figuring out how to run databases on k8s so it's a long road.
After they ditched there free tier, it became basically untenable to justify trying Planetscale for $30 (USD as well) on a POC or MVP product, and it also felt like you were paying a lot for unneeded hardware.
I guess this is one of the 2 or 3 things Sam talked about coming till end of year. I wonder what's the other 1 or 2.
I also imagine the previous Hobby plan running on Vitess is actually more expensive to run than even this $5 dollar tier, not viable unless it is on Postgres Metal with no HA.
I also wish there is a list of non hyperscaler providers with regions that are close to planetscale offering. Last time I checked Hetzner dont come anywhere close enough to be used for compute.
Hey ksec, you are right vitess is more expensive to run naturally. Do you host your apps in hertzer or is it a factor of cost? if you email me sam@planetscale.com i can give you free credits for either Vitess or Postgres.
This is actually a really interesting offering to have available as someone who needs DEV tier PG databases for a better testing pipeline on a shoestring budget.
"we've seen a number of Supabase -> PlanetScale migrations and it's been pretty simple with significant cost savings for the customer. The scale part of this is hard to answer because it really depends on the workload"
Looks like this is a perfect answer to my question, I mean I get it guys, I have created a comment here too on why their free tier thing deletion thing was wrong but I also get it, I personally knew a girl on discord who would create 20 free instances of some coding free thing just because she can and I honestly felt that moment that this is the reason why people like me who just use stuff casually don't have it for free.
Anyways, Oh god I was this close to writing it but then I saw the outlore's comments lore and how sam said "Either way I don't care what you remember or think", I am typing it in the moment but Sam you had no reason to type it smh
Most people are trying to help you, maybe the scars are still recent when the free tier was lost but there are better ways of explaining that the scar was both side, that you were hurt too and are willing to explain to them in a kind manner.
I was this close for advocating for PlanetScale, nope, Supabase/Neon, atleast they are open source but personally I just feel like hosting a hetzner instance and self hosting postgres but the only thing I am scared is that I am gonna mess things up and somehow would one day come to a broken system without backups. Any good utility or anything that makes backup as secure as one feels in the cloud regarding backups?
I don't buy that someone commenting "Remember when they shafted the free plan, laid off some good people and redesigned their website to look like some garish notepad? Pepperidge Farm remembers..." is trying to help me. It's naive to always assume good intentions, it allows people to be rude. Postgres is open source, we operate postgres really well at a price it's a super fair exchange of value imo.
Most shared hosting services offer something similar for about the same price. On Dreamhost, the database servers are independent of the hosting servers. You can access the database servers from outside Dreamhost, if you configure MySQL to allow it.
I think it is amusing that half the comments section here is complaining about the lack of a free plan and the other half is complaining that the $5 plan is too cheap for them to keep it around.
Sounds exactly like real world politics. I thought people are waking up to if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. And free is perhaps the most expensive thing. Turns out no.
oh how i wish they were in azure. azure's postgresql flex offering is horrid. for some reason the HA standby instance can't be used as a read replica, it's filled with maintenance windows / downtime-ful upgrades / etc..
And that is why egress fees are anticompetitive. Azure forces their customers to demand that their service providers host in Azure.
In a less anti-competitive world you would be perfectly happy to use a database hosted in an Equinix facility or whatever next door. You could connect via a fractional 100Gbps link at a price multiple orders of magnitude below what Azure would actually charge for an equivalent amount of data transfer.
This is not true. All of our Vitess operations assume 3 node clusters. It's a lot of work to change (we have hundreds of thousands of nodes). For Postgres it was a lot simpler to do based on the architecture. There are equally good things coming for Vitess it's just for a slightly different audience.
Databricks Neon [1] has a free tier for their Postgres service. Neon's strength that allows them to offer a free tier lies in their serverless, cloud-native PostgreSQL architecture with a separation of storage and compute resources. This allows Neon to scale compute to zero automatically when the database is idle.
Should I consider this if I’m using Render or fly.io for my services? Would latency be an issue? On my day job I cluster in the same AWS AZ and don’t realize what impact this would have for an app that may not be colocated.
Really big impact! I'm not sure how fly or render work but if your compute instances are in $city make sure your planetscale instance is too. You shouldn't be far off 'in region aws' latency at the point.
Most people only need a single database node and will only ever need a single database node. There are many LOB apps in the world that you could reasonably turn off from 5 pm to 9 am every day. Five 9’s is an incredibly expensive and often unnecessary feature. I think this is a great offering.
Funnily enough I've been contemplating the idea of websites open during business hours and such for "local" as in kinda national scales. But it breaks down quickly once you factor in a potentially global audience.
So yeah, in the end available as much as possible (while sounding like "I needed it yesterday") might be the way to go even if you're not actually aiming for the extreme end of uptime.
Government websites like that aren't crazy uncommon because the letter of the law around accessibility can be interpreted to require a real person to be available any time the website is available for certain electronic forms: https://freakonomics.com/2012/08/this-website-only-open-duri...
(people in the comments did not get the correct reason why)
I mean, planetscale first was a consumer / it looked as if they were B2C and I think they then pivoted into B2B, got postgres working, and now they are re-entering B2C-ish with the 5$ plan.
I like PlanetScale, but they already have precedent very recently for having a free-tier and then cancelling it for a minimum of $40/month plan, which made many people switch. What's to stop them from doing the same here?
Be wary of building a cheap hobby project on it expecting pricing to stay consistent. If $40+ isn't feasible for you, you may be trying to switch off to a hosted PostgreSQL option, with all the pain MySQL->Postgres entails, soon.
(Planetscale employee)
This is very different though: it's not a free tier, it's an actual single node DB as a paid product. It's definitely not a good fit for every usecase, but if you have a hobby project it's a great way to start with plenty of room to scale if/when you get actual usage
Similarly to other replies (but my own opinion): it's not a huge source of revenue today, on a single customer basis, compared to our biggest customers, sure. But our goal is to provide potential customers that can't justify larger scale, 3-nodes databases, something they can build on and grow on our platform.
We would never want to pull the rug on paying customers: we want to enable them :-) sure it's not a huge part of our revenue, but that's not the goal. We just want to provide a great product, in a way that's affordable to everyone.
You of course don't have to take my word, but I think it makes business sense to do this and not pull the rug.
Compare to a free tier where you bleed money in the hopes that customers will end up paying you. Hope isn't a good business strategy right? :-)
In what way? Companies drop/move on from small customers all the time as positions and analysis changes. $5 a month might make sense now, but with thin profits, a lower than predicted "upgrade rate" and maybe a higher than anticipated support cost etc and this becomes a less profitable option without price increases, which loses customers causing more increases because of none scalable costs etc.
Throw in a change of leadership or business focus and it's an easy short term boost to drop the many smaller customers and focus on the big fish who make the real money.
It's a common pattern, echoed over many industries, and while you might not see it being likely here right now, if the concept literally doesn't make sense to you, you need to look up some basic business ideas because it's a pretty valid concern.
It's easier to pull the rug out from under a group of customers who earn you 5% of your revenue than it is to do the same thing to a group of customers who make you 25% of your revenue.
This small $5 plan is obviously not going to make Planetscale very much revenue.
You were buying flow for your sales funnel with a free plan now you want to attract users with a low tier plan. Your reputation was hurt with the first rug pull so why be surprised that users expect another rug pull from you in the future?
If a free plan attracts users that can be upsold is that free plan not profitable _vs_ paying for advertising?
If such upselling is done via rug pull tactics it damages your reputation vs never having a free plan in the first place.
If a new bank offered you free or discounted banking would you move over your accounts and payments and credit cards? What if that bank has a reputation for upselling via rug pulling?
For users the cost of switching can mean that services that are free or cheap are not worth it if they are expecting a rug pull.
Why would we? we make a (small) profit on these cheaper tiers. We are a sustainable and profitable company. Also the free tier wasnt cancelled very recently it was 1.5 years ago so you are reaching a bit here.
Your $5 plan may be gross margin positive but incentives are to push users into higher margin plans and from this pov this new plan looks much like your previous free plan which was rug pulled. Offering a free service to buy users then imposing migration costs on these users when you rug pull damaged your reputation. Next time perhaps grandfather existing users instead. If you want this new plan to be taken seriously update your terms to promise you will not rug pull again.
He's responding in good faith to people expressing doubt that they will maintain this pricing tier, and is responding to rebuttals. Whether you agree with his point of view is different.
Case in point. Potential customers will see this dismissal as the equivalent of how long they expect this pricing to remain. You’re free to increase the price in a year and when customers are irked, “why isn’t it $5 anymore?” They’ll be met with “that’s not recent.” “That was so long ago”
If you want to rebuild reputation with hobby tier, you’ll probably want to put in a 3 year pricing guarantee, not 1 month like the notice last time.
Remember when they shafted the free plan, laid off some good people and redesigned their website to look like some garish notepad? Pepperidge Farm remembers...
Yeah, and they became an actual profitable tech company which is extremely rare today.
Sounds horrible. Trying to think of another tech company that scaled down a free offering or laid off staff. Coming up empty.
I remember. It was a very painful moment for everyone involved. I still miss the people who aren't here anymore. I am not happy that it happened but I am also I am very glad to be at a profitable company. I get to work at a company that is growing sustainably surrounded by people I admire. I love our customers and I think in the long run people will root for a company that isn't just lighting money on fire at the alter of fake growth.
Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
> Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
it does feel to me that one way to demonstrate that is to not get pissy on hackernews. i know you’re in founder mode or whatever but this comment is the thing i’m now going to remember you for
My apologies for sounding bitter.
You stated you don't care what I think. Just wanted to say though that i've admired you and your company for a long time. I participated in user interviews so I could score one of your famous hats. I submitted copious feedback. I was an evangelist for branching workflows and recommended several colleagues to your product. I watched all the talks, interviews and devrel videos.
I'm glad you are doing better now as a company, but as naive as it may be, I guess I would love to see an example of a company that consistently put people over profits, that is all
If a business does not run at a profit, it folds, and all the people there lose out.
Now, of course, the scale of the profit is worth discussing. The use of the profit is worth discussing. But in general terms some profit is necessary.
For example, I bootstraped a business from 0 to 50 people. We took no outside investment. We "paid" for the growth using profits. Our working capital, cash reserves, stock, equipment, vehicles etc, all come out of profits.
Yes, over the years, there have been things that didn't work out. People who ended up surplus to requirements. People not suited to the role they were in. Most left amicably. Some were pushed. None of that was easy but it was necessary because just keeping unproductive (or worse, divisive) people around is bad for everyone.
Running a business is hard. Firing people is hard. Comments like "people over profits" are flippant, but miss the underlying realities small businesses face all the time.
Yes, there are large tech businesses out there with bottomless pockets, who hire (and fire) by the thousands. But surely those bring hired in cohorts that big understand that a wind blows both ways.
It's not necessarily helpful though to apply your feelings about that to all the businesses that are not that.
I have immense respect for you building a profitable bootstrapped business. We raised venture to do this, I can't imagine bootstrapping. People are upset that I said I don't care what he thinks and maybe I was harsh but honestly people who have never tried doing this are always the ones to take shots, you basically can't care.
I am wondering about one thing though. I would also wish to do things bootstrapped if possible if I ever do anything but I just have some questions that might sound stupid but alright
How do you actually sell stuff on the internet with a price?
I will admit, free stuff are easy to sell... because they are free. But once you remove the free stuff, it becomes a scar easy to tell in the future, is the answer always having the paid stuff or somehow limiting who gets the free stuff.
Like as I wrote in another comment, I like fly.io's free model of some credits per month with credit card, I mean, I don't like them taking credit card but if that's what prevents them from spam, I would still consider it decent enough
But I have read some places where saying things like asking for a credit card would drive away most users, and even asking for mail for sign up sometimes really
As such the world has transitioned into something which runs via the ad model as people in some HN thread long ago basically summed it upto, it was evolution of sorts
Yet, I am on HackerNews, I care about privacy. I would feel the largest double-speak if my software got ads, at that point, I would just release it for free but that would make me no money, maybe even cost me some money, making it unsustaianable
I am not sure about the reality of things but I am a pretty frugal guy, so naturally its really hard for me to expect people to buy stuff, let alone the stuff I make/hack.
I could try to open source any stuff I build, but at that point, what is the matter of that aside from getting some stars/internet points, don't get me wrong I love the philosophy of open source yet I feel like its very hard for me to actually generate money out of it
I love building simple things I guess, My projects ideally would be a simple golang binary maybe with postgres but sqlite's cool too, and I don't want to make it too hard to install unintentionally to trap people to my cloud or whatever really
I am asking because I feel like I can't go from 0 to 0 (employing even myself) and I feel like playing the growth game could be good but sooner or later, I would find myself in the same position as planetscale in that sense and I don't want it really, and I personally feel like my work can survive without VC funding as well. SO I genuinely don't know how I will get money from projects
My projects are niche as well, most of them aren't for profitability but rather to learn. I personally feel like I might be a good guy to do a job and to do these things as random projects to increase my portfolio and if luck strikes then that could be good I suppose.
I don't even expect someone to donate to my github if I ever create a project. Low confidence maybe, I am not sure. I have seen so many cool github projects that have gotten stars but not donations. I would love to donate to them, but personally I am frugal, I don't want it as a shield but I am opening up that shield and wanting to donate to open source. In fact if I make money through such any projects, I will try to actually donate to open source in the process as well.
So my question to you is: How? You guys make it feel so simple having people pay , There was the 4 hour work week which sort of suggested-ish building plugins for things etc. and I did calculation for it to actually make me "free" and I don't know but having 1000 people buy even 5$ personally a month would feel huge. but I am not sure as my frugality makes me believe everyone is like me and so why would they give me 5$ when they could do what I did or use some open source software with just some differences really.
Don't pretend you were doing anything but trolling with a comment like "Remember when they shafted the free plan, laid off some good people and redesigned their website to look like some garish notepad? Pepperidge Farm remembers..." if you liked the company or product so much why would you take shots like that? if you had emailed me at any point and told me you had done this stuff i would have just given you a load of free credits. i do it all the time.
Last sentence completely undercuts the other sentiments you shared in your comment… probably best to cut stuff like that out in the future IMHO, even if it’s how you feel.
> Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
Well I will remember this. It reflects poorly that your responses are childish when grappling with light criticism. Is this “Founder Mode”?
> people will root for a company that isn't just lighting money on fire at the alter of fake growth.
Pray tell, why did the company adopt the "fake growth" strategy in the first place?
> Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
It's evident you do. Feeling upset is fine, but writing that down as an attempt at a mic-drop statement just makes you appear incredibly thin-skinned.
Rug-pulls. Not even once.
> Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
If you took your time to write it, you do care or if you genuinely don't, then people would now take it as a challenge to make you care...
This is just not good light. not all attention is created equal. This will hurt your company and your image.
Please, try to apologize to them if possible
I thought about it as an exercise as to what I thought your should last comment should be, it took some time but here it is
Hey, its great that you remember, it means that you cared about planetscale and somehow we were forced between false growth and real harsh truth and we wanted to present the truth, sorry if it had impacted any of your services. I know maybe I can't do much about how you can feel now about me or the company but I genuinely hope no matter what solution you might use now, you succeed in it with great success .If you feel like it, maybe give us another try but hey no pressure and as always, have a nice day :)
This took some time personally, especially after the part I genuinely hope no matter what solution personally but it didn't take more than 5 minutes to draft the whole response really.
Being kind helps. Atleast that's my philosphy or I would like to present it as such, I feel as if we are more common than different and basic human kindness resonates with that.
I hope you become the company seeking people's satisfaction first and absolute profits later but maybe that's an ideal. Just be honest with a bit of kindness and humility as there would be grace in it.
Honestly, my suggestion is to create something similar to fly.io really, have a 5$ free credit system but which requires credit card when signing up. It should prevent you from spams and if need be, try to limit it and try to do some excessive bot clearing
Maybe if you feel like you can have 5000$ for free without much compensation, then have limited (maybe verified?) people join in it for free with just credit card
Have some good restrictions on free license really, and although I haven't used fly.io as even the credit card got way too much of a requirement for me personally but,I would still look into what/how they are doing/implementing it
Taking some VPN as cautions plus taking note of suspicious activities from IP etc. comes to my mind as well if you go through this route. I think that you can genuinely create a good way to move some people as well or keep a free service while restricting it heavily really
Personally I wouldn't be able to afford the 5$ thing as well for just starting it out, I mean I haven't paid for any subscription ever on internet.
I am not sure what you are going to do or how you are going to pan out and take my suggestions lightly if need be, but please improve the tones and genuinely apologize to them if possible.
I don't know much about founder mode as other commentors point it out. I just think that your comment was a little bit rude and there were ways to make it better really
I'm surprised so many replies here are about removing a free tier 2 years ago. Things cost money, what did you expect? Whenever I get free products that cost money I expect it's either temporary, or I'm being the product myself.
didn't help that they called it "Free forever" before taking it away. Lesson learned
I only remember it was called "Hobby" Plan.
we never said that
understandable, but again, "forever" as in heat death of the universe? Sadly there is no such thing as forever either.
Then call it something else
If somebody built a service to try out planetscale or the fact that planetscale was constantly hyped around / sponsored some big names atleast in the youtube scale, I am pretty sure that some people went there thinking about the free forever and everything...
I do think it was a little bad move because now you can't even test planetscale and the memories of its free stuff still might haunt some people
Were we supposed to just keep it up until we go out of business or something? Out of sheer duty. Like burn everything we built to the ground to keep the free tier going as long as possible? Endlessly indentured to provide a free service on the internet for people that will never pay us money so that the people that do pay us money can eventually have to move provider too because we are shutting down?
I didn't enjoy doing it. I felt bad but I don't regret it at all.
I wonder why other providers don't use metal ssd sync replication technique that planetscale uses? Most of them just default to EBS.
My interest in it peaked when I heard about NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe/TCP) and SPDK from Xata[1] and apparently with that performance is as good as planetscale metal, but planetscale found their methodology flawed[2] and they Xata never responded.
[1] https://xata.io/blog/reaction-to-the-planetscale-postgresql-...
[2] https://planetscale.com/benchmarks/xata
I'm honestly confused why local nvme disks haven't become the standard for cloud offerings a long time ago.
Aiven (not working for them, just a happy client) started offering local nvme disks for their postgres service in 2017. (https://aiven.io/blog/larger-and-faster-aiven-postgresql-pla...)
Back then I was sure it was only a matter of time for other hosted database providers to move on from EBS. But until Planetscale made a lot of noise about Metal no one seemed to bother.
It's very hard to do. They all want to do it but can't so now it's their marketing team's jobs to lie to people about why they shouldn't want it.
@samlambert what exactly makes it hard? Isn't it as simple as setting synchronous_commit=remote_apply or does planetscale have a custom strategy or are there other operational issues?
Just asking since I find it both the planetscale's engineering and its impact on competitive landscape very interesting.
you have to make sure you will never terminate these nodes, that you have all the operations maturity to cycle them responsibly, and resize them. I am sure they will get there one day but most people are still figuring out how to run databases on k8s so it's a long road.
I notice that PlanetScale has a Developer Educator position available. Has anyone sent that to Aaron Francis yet? He might be interested.
I'm not sure returning to his previous job is his top priority right now.
Imagine laying off one of the most genuine, friendly developer evangelists of all time.
It was sad to say goodbye to Aaron yes. I am glad he and I are on good terms again. I have immense professional respect for him.
This is really good!
After they ditched there free tier, it became basically untenable to justify trying Planetscale for $30 (USD as well) on a POC or MVP product, and it also felt like you were paying a lot for unneeded hardware.
I guess this is one of the 2 or 3 things Sam talked about coming till end of year. I wonder what's the other 1 or 2.
I also imagine the previous Hobby plan running on Vitess is actually more expensive to run than even this $5 dollar tier, not viable unless it is on Postgres Metal with no HA.
I also wish there is a list of non hyperscaler providers with regions that are close to planetscale offering. Last time I checked Hetzner dont come anywhere close enough to be used for compute.
Hey ksec, you are right vitess is more expensive to run naturally. Do you host your apps in hertzer or is it a factor of cost? if you email me sam@planetscale.com i can give you free credits for either Vitess or Postgres.
This is actually a really interesting offering to have available as someone who needs DEV tier PG databases for a better testing pipeline on a shoestring budget.
btw I've used neon for that and it worked well. Disclaimer: I have no relationship with them, I just have a shoestring budget.
For context: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45339279) (which basically asked if using supabase's free tier and then migrating to planetscale when needing the scale)
and Sam's response
"we've seen a number of Supabase -> PlanetScale migrations and it's been pretty simple with significant cost savings for the customer. The scale part of this is hard to answer because it really depends on the workload"
Looks like this is a perfect answer to my question, I mean I get it guys, I have created a comment here too on why their free tier thing deletion thing was wrong but I also get it, I personally knew a girl on discord who would create 20 free instances of some coding free thing just because she can and I honestly felt that moment that this is the reason why people like me who just use stuff casually don't have it for free.
Anyways, Oh god I was this close to writing it but then I saw the outlore's comments lore and how sam said "Either way I don't care what you remember or think", I am typing it in the moment but Sam you had no reason to type it smh
Most people are trying to help you, maybe the scars are still recent when the free tier was lost but there are better ways of explaining that the scar was both side, that you were hurt too and are willing to explain to them in a kind manner.
I was this close for advocating for PlanetScale, nope, Supabase/Neon, atleast they are open source but personally I just feel like hosting a hetzner instance and self hosting postgres but the only thing I am scared is that I am gonna mess things up and somehow would one day come to a broken system without backups. Any good utility or anything that makes backup as secure as one feels in the cloud regarding backups?
I don't buy that someone commenting "Remember when they shafted the free plan, laid off some good people and redesigned their website to look like some garish notepad? Pepperidge Farm remembers..." is trying to help me. It's naive to always assume good intentions, it allows people to be rude. Postgres is open source, we operate postgres really well at a price it's a super fair exchange of value imo.
Most shared hosting services offer something similar for about the same price. On Dreamhost, the database servers are independent of the hosting servers. You can access the database servers from outside Dreamhost, if you configure MySQL to allow it.
I think it is amusing that half the comments section here is complaining about the lack of a free plan and the other half is complaining that the $5 plan is too cheap for them to keep it around.
Sounds exactly like real world politics. I thought people are waking up to if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. And free is perhaps the most expensive thing. Turns out no.
oh how i wish they were in azure. azure's postgresql flex offering is horrid. for some reason the HA standby instance can't be used as a read replica, it's filled with maintenance windows / downtime-ful upgrades / etc..
And that is why egress fees are anticompetitive. Azure forces their customers to demand that their service providers host in Azure.
In a less anti-competitive world you would be perfectly happy to use a database hosted in an Equinix facility or whatever next door. You could connect via a fractional 100Gbps link at a price multiple orders of magnitude below what Azure would actually charge for an equivalent amount of data transfer.
Sadly they don't mention that this will come to MySQL/vitess as well, it makes it look like Postgres is thing they care about now as a company.
This is not true. All of our Vitess operations assume 3 node clusters. It's a lot of work to change (we have hundreds of thousands of nodes). For Postgres it was a lot simpler to do based on the architecture. There are equally good things coming for Vitess it's just for a slightly different audience.
Databricks Neon [1] has a free tier for their Postgres service. Neon's strength that allows them to offer a free tier lies in their serverless, cloud-native PostgreSQL architecture with a separation of storage and compute resources. This allows Neon to scale compute to zero automatically when the database is idle.
[1] https://neon.com
Should I consider this if I’m using Render or fly.io for my services? Would latency be an issue? On my day job I cluster in the same AWS AZ and don’t realize what impact this would have for an app that may not be colocated.
Really big impact! I'm not sure how fly or render work but if your compute instances are in $city make sure your planetscale instance is too. You shouldn't be far off 'in region aws' latency at the point.
Going from 3 node highly available multi region DB clusters at 30$ per month to 5$ a month for a single DB node
Most people only need a single database node and will only ever need a single database node. There are many LOB apps in the world that you could reasonably turn off from 5 pm to 9 am every day. Five 9’s is an incredibly expensive and often unnecessary feature. I think this is a great offering.
Funnily enough I've been contemplating the idea of websites open during business hours and such for "local" as in kinda national scales. But it breaks down quickly once you factor in a potentially global audience.
So yeah, in the end available as much as possible (while sounding like "I needed it yesterday") might be the way to go even if you're not actually aiming for the extreme end of uptime.
B&h photo video closes their order system on Jewish holidays in the NYC time zone. I often find myself saving items to order the next day on there.
Government websites like that aren't crazy uncommon because the letter of the law around accessibility can be interpreted to require a real person to be available any time the website is available for certain electronic forms: https://freakonomics.com/2012/08/this-website-only-open-duri...
(people in the comments did not get the correct reason why)
Stay away from them, You never know when they pull the rug
How hard could it be to migrate away from $5/m worth of a managed PG?
pull the rug on what? a profitable product?
well...Many database vendors offers free databases for dev purpose for years, i mean it's not a news.
I mean, planetscale first was a consumer / it looked as if they were B2C and I think they then pivoted into B2B, got postgres working, and now they are re-entering B2C-ish with the 5$ plan.
What does the durability story look like for this single node offering ?.
data is still replicated safely from the single node which is also backed by EBS.
How much vCPU, memory, and storage will this have?
Will it be planet scale still?
Is it possible to install Timescale on those?
we are working on the open source licensed version.
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I like PlanetScale, but they already have precedent very recently for having a free-tier and then cancelling it for a minimum of $40/month plan, which made many people switch. What's to stop them from doing the same here?
Be wary of building a cheap hobby project on it expecting pricing to stay consistent. If $40+ isn't feasible for you, you may be trying to switch off to a hosted PostgreSQL option, with all the pain MySQL->Postgres entails, soon.
(Planetscale employee) This is very different though: it's not a free tier, it's an actual single node DB as a paid product. It's definitely not a good fit for every usecase, but if you have a hobby project it's a great way to start with plenty of room to scale if/when you get actual usage
It's very similar in that it's not a huge source of revenue for Planetscale, so easy to pull the rug without disrupting revenue too much
Similarly to other replies (but my own opinion): it's not a huge source of revenue today, on a single customer basis, compared to our biggest customers, sure. But our goal is to provide potential customers that can't justify larger scale, 3-nodes databases, something they can build on and grow on our platform. We would never want to pull the rug on paying customers: we want to enable them :-) sure it's not a huge part of our revenue, but that's not the goal. We just want to provide a great product, in a way that's affordable to everyone. You of course don't have to take my word, but I think it makes business sense to do this and not pull the rug. Compare to a free tier where you bleed money in the hopes that customers will end up paying you. Hope isn't a good business strategy right? :-)
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this makes no sense to me
In what way? Companies drop/move on from small customers all the time as positions and analysis changes. $5 a month might make sense now, but with thin profits, a lower than predicted "upgrade rate" and maybe a higher than anticipated support cost etc and this becomes a less profitable option without price increases, which loses customers causing more increases because of none scalable costs etc.
Throw in a change of leadership or business focus and it's an easy short term boost to drop the many smaller customers and focus on the big fish who make the real money.
It's a common pattern, echoed over many industries, and while you might not see it being likely here right now, if the concept literally doesn't make sense to you, you need to look up some basic business ideas because it's a pretty valid concern.
It's easier to pull the rug out from under a group of customers who earn you 5% of your revenue than it is to do the same thing to a group of customers who make you 25% of your revenue.
This small $5 plan is obviously not going to make Planetscale very much revenue.
It's not made to make money, but to funnel paid customers onto their platform.
but its entry level pricing for customers that grow. it will be great for us. there is no point hurting our reputation and slowing growth.
You were buying flow for your sales funnel with a free plan now you want to attract users with a low tier plan. Your reputation was hurt with the first rug pull so why be surprised that users expect another rug pull from you in the future?
I think what Sam means is $5/mo is already profitable for them. Free plan wasn't.
If a free plan attracts users that can be upsold is that free plan not profitable _vs_ paying for advertising?
If such upselling is done via rug pull tactics it damages your reputation vs never having a free plan in the first place.
If a new bank offered you free or discounted banking would you move over your accounts and payments and credit cards? What if that bank has a reputation for upselling via rug pulling?
For users the cost of switching can mean that services that are free or cheap are not worth it if they are expecting a rug pull.
Why would we? we make a (small) profit on these cheaper tiers. We are a sustainable and profitable company. Also the free tier wasnt cancelled very recently it was 1.5 years ago so you are reaching a bit here.
Why would a company squeeze customers after making them dependendent? Never heard of it.
Also what was capitalism again?
the reason we make sure all our products are gross margin positive is so this doesn't have to happen.
Do you intend to sell to people with one brain half or how should I interpret this argument?
Your $5 plan may be gross margin positive but incentives are to push users into higher margin plans and from this pov this new plan looks much like your previous free plan which was rug pulled. Offering a free service to buy users then imposing migration costs on these users when you rug pull damaged your reputation. Next time perhaps grandfather existing users instead. If you want this new plan to be taken seriously update your terms to promise you will not rug pull again.
This is a lazy response.
You currently make a small profit on cheaper tiers. Things change
Compute, storage, and network throughput are only getting cheaper over time. Assuming all other costs hold steady, it should only get more profitable.
A bit of unsolicited advice:
This post is the first time I've heard of your company and your blog post interested me.
When proprietors go to the mat in the comment section, I immediately lose any interest in patronizing them.
He's responding in good faith to people expressing doubt that they will maintain this pricing tier, and is responding to rebuttals. Whether you agree with his point of view is different.
I know comments section drama is fun, but I'm not seeing it here and it feels like you're trying to create it from scratch.
I think it's great evening entertainment. Keep fanning the flames while I go make some popcorn!
Sam is a great twitter follow
thank you
Off-topic, but you have a typo on your pricing page: "high-availablity"
why is it going to the mat? i had to correct something that was untrue. 1.5 years is not very recently.
1.5 years ago is recently IMO.
Case in point. Potential customers will see this dismissal as the equivalent of how long they expect this pricing to remain. You’re free to increase the price in a year and when customers are irked, “why isn’t it $5 anymore?” They’ll be met with “that’s not recent.” “That was so long ago”
If you want to rebuild reputation with hobby tier, you’ll probably want to put in a 3 year pricing guarantee, not 1 month like the notice last time.