1 GB of RAM for Postgres is really only useful for tinkering IMHO. Even for development, you’ll quickly need more memory, so HA doesn’t provide much value here. If you go with something even remotely reasonable (4 GB RAM, 200 GB SSD, 1/2 vCPU — and that’s still on the low end), the cost jumps to about $290/month. For that price, you could easily hire someone to set up HA Postgres for you on Hetzner or OVH and once configured, HA Postgres typically requires minimal ongoing maintenance.
Also, this is a shared server, not a truly dedicated one like you’d get with bare-metal providers. So, calling it "Metal" might be misleading marketing trick, but if you want someone to always blame and don’t mind overpaying for that comfort, then the managed option might be the right thing.
Considering they are charging an unfathomable $4529/mo for 256 GB databases, extrapolating that to a serious use case you can indeed just hire someone full-time with how much you'd save. And then you'll actually have someone who understands how databases work instead of treating it like an expensive black box.
Yeah per your edit that'd be for 256GB RAM which puts that into serious dollar category. For comparison I checked what AWS asks for for the same spec and that'd be $4616/month (for a db.m8gd.16xlarge), and that doesn't even yield you an actual NVMe. You can of course build the same for cheaper on Hetzner but again then you're on the hook also for the operations of the thing, which at that size is possibly non-trivial.
> $4529/month... can indeed just hire someone full-time
That's $54,348/year, not including the cost of benefits, not including stock compensation. Let's say you reserve 20% for benefits and that comes out to $43,478.40 in salary.
Besides the benefit of not needing the management / communication overhead of hiring somebody, do you know any DBAs willing to take a full-time job for $43,478.40 in salary?
But that's the point, innit? How many SMEs need multiple production databases of that size? Nobody's really suggesting that Fortune 500 size enterprises should get by without DBAs. There's a big difference between an enterprise paying for a DBA take care of fleets of production databases, compared to a <50 employee shop that should do just fine with a single production database.
I think this product is mostly only viable in NA market where the SDE wage is much higher than European one to justify spending $x/mo for DBaaS instead of hosting their own
It depends a bit on your cloud provider but some of them have an offering that doesn't always match your needs or their pricing might be much more expensive at equal performance.
You're pointing out exactly what bothered me with this post in the first place: "we moved from microservices to a monolith and our problems went away"...
... except the problems had not much to do with the service architecture but all to do with operational mistakes and insufficient tooling: bad CI, bad autoscaling, bad oncall.
That's an unfair representation of the situation. There's nothing about this device that implies "disposable". The EU is definitely the problem here. I think the problem is the EU loves legislating entrepreneurial creativity into the dirt.
The practice of an entire working population commuting from an hour+ away to a few buildings in the center of the city, sitting on their ass for 8 hours a day, eating a packed lunch, and commuting back home is at most a couple hundred years old. But sure, go on about your "hundreds-to-thousands of years of history".
Calling out every abrasive comment would take more effort than I'm willing to expend, and would itself be pretty abrasive. So I picked the comment where they called Covid (the event where many people died, had their businesses ruined, etc.) "fun" over the one that mentioned work-life balance.
The person you're replying to asked if it was fun. Consider that my sarcasm was meant to be sort of tongue in cheek and not incredibly serious, which is a very different kind of tone from other comments in this chain.
Honestly, if the bus/delivery driver needed a mid-shift break to deal with some life stuff, yeah by all means, I personally think they should be able to do that kind of stuff (though maybe we start by giving them bathroom breaks?). The business hiring them should adapt.
(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.
I agree, removing the free plan was a bad move. They should have at least grandfathered existing free tier users. I was just explaining their point of view.
When you don't need advertising anymore, the free plan starts becoming a net loss. If the $5 plan is profitable today, it will probably stay profitable forever as their costs will only go down, never up. There is little incentive to remove it (until Broadcom or Oracle acquires them).
You did a good job explaining their view. What I am doing is explaining the view of users and judging by your last post I have not yet done a good job so let me try again:
If elimination of a service plan is expected to push enough users to a _more_ profitable service plan why would a business not do it? Does it matter if the plan to be eliminated, generates _some_ profit?
