Yeah, at a certain point it's just always running 24/7, which they charge you usage-based if your company is over 750 hours in a month.
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.
Maybe you were referring to specifics of Neon's usage-based pricing.
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.
Having plugged your numbers into the pricing for both Neon and Planetscale I'm rather confused. At Planetscale, given the numbers cited in the post, you're paying for 4 servers (+ replicas) with one eighth of a vCPU each, running 24/7. That's equivalent to about 375 Neon compute-hours per month. Your $69 Neon plan included twice that. Neon only goes down to 1/4th of a vCPU, but that does include the same amount of memory as the 1/8th at Planetscale, so take that 4 times and you have 4 databases running all month for the price of your $69 plan at Neon. How did you get to $250?
In the database world, serverless/autoscaling pricing is almost always more expensive for real workloads. The % of workloads where it makes sense is small. Ones where 90% of the time there's little small traffic and 10% of the time the DB sees large traffic spikes. Otherwise, just pay a fixed cost for the hardware you need.
This pitfall of "serverless" has been widely known since people started abusing lambda to be "always on". Serverless is a PaaS gaslight to make you pay more for the perceived convenience.
Not necessarily. Netlify told me as I had blown past 20 bucks for 1TB of traffic that paying 50 bucks for every additional 100GB was 'a good problem to have'. Well no, not at all. If your project is one of love, the end game is not subjecting your audience to boatloads of ads.
I hear you on that, but I would say "usage-based pricing" does not equate to "increasing marginal cost" at all. There are both usage-based providers that have increasing marginal cost and those that don't.
Seems reasonable to me? After all, they went to "predictable pricing" which seems to be generally better than usage-based one.
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.
I sort of feel like their own product, Maple.AI, have the same issue. The more users use the product, the more they have to pay. So they clearly understand that the pricing model is problematic, but they still use it themselves?
> We have thousands of users generating thousands of chats daily. Lawyers discussing sensitive cases. Executives planning strategy. Developers working on proprietary code. They trust us because their data is mathematically guaranteed to be private. But that trust evaporates quickly when the service is unavailable.
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.
we're a pre-seed startup with a team of two, so no money for a full time engineer babysitting the database. first impressions and reputation are big as we launch, so we need reliability
We're experimenting with Lakebase now (Databricks' name for Neon).
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).
As with any product comparison, price is often the last thing to compete on. For us it was the reliability and debugging insights that mattered. The cost savings was just a bonus.
What exactly is PlanetScale Postgres? Is it plain managed Postgres ala RDS or something more bespoke like Neon? I know PlanetScale is working on a Vitess-like sharded Postgres (Neki?) but I’m guessing that is not yet running in the cloud?
It's more like rds but it has far better developer experience than rds with dashboards and better migration. Their unique offering is their metal offering which uses local SSD for superior performance https://planetscale.com/metal
How is the pricing like? Unfortunately I can't go past 1500GB for storage on their pricing calculator. We have tons of data and I don't feel like scheduling a sales call just to estimate cost
Their dashboards and metrics are really good. Plus the performance is great even on their non-metal offering too. I hope to one day be able to justify the upgrade to it.
Here's their announcement blog post with a bit more info, like their benchmarks:
Good luck with the startup. TBH, I think going for as much managed solutions as possible while you bootstrap makes sense. Something more tailor-made often doesn't make sense until you start scaling.
Readit News
> - 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 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:
https://planetscale.com/blog/planetscale-for-postgres
https://planetscale.com/blog/benchmarking-postgres