I want to like this so bad, but the free tier changes still haunt me. I ran a little hobby project for a while on it that helped junior developers find jobs. The work needed to switch from PlanetScale ultimately meant I just canned the project.
Fairly or not, when I see PlanetScale, that’s what I think of.
Seeing the CEO on here defending it as if they nailed the execution of it doesn’t help either.
Though, I wonder with any cloud provider of databases: why?
You’re basically giving your data to a 3rd-party to have access to and to be reliant on.
You have a backup of your source, but I bet many don’t have local non-cloud backups of their databases, maybe because it’s too much data to do easily, and everyone assumes the provider’s backups will suffice. This is a main reason I think that more recognized cloud brands like AWS and Azure are used.
I also had a couple of projects on their hobby plan and the pain of that rug pull made me swear I'd never use them again, no matter the size or context. I would have happily paid like $15 at the time too, but all they offered was a move to their $40+ pm plan. Insane and a terrible way to treat your users.
Irony is, I loved the brand and would have advocated hard for them otherwise.
At the time, their messaging was all about how, "we are for the enterprise and larger customers, not these piddling little poor plebs".
Well I guess they've belatedly realised that plebs turn into managers and future enterprise customers.
They got rid of Aaron Francis too who I thought did excellent work for them.
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...
Um well, they shouldn't have done that. "If it means they go broke and need to shut down for me to keep having my free tier DB for 3 tables and 2 users, so be it, go broke"
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
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."
Imagine building a product for developers and then going on Hacker News telling people to fuck off.
Someone at my job mentioned using PlanetScale recently. I said "I'll check it out" and now I have: the CEO has terrible judgement and is a jerk. Permanent veto.
I appreciate you’re responding personally and directly to people instead of running it through a corporate PR machine. That being said I’d also consider your tone, I have no doubt the topic pushes on a sore wound but the “I don’t care what you think” is probably not the attitude you want potential customers to stumble upon in the future.
I am not a customer and not in the market to be a customer anytime soon, I have no horse in this race, just an observation.
> 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.
So as some of my own feelings/thoughts on this: I've also sat on the "receiving side" of a "free forever" campaign now 2 times in my career. The first time driven by the CEO and the second time driven by the marketing team (and supported by the CEO). In both cases, I knew the truth (sitting on the product management side) that there was no sustainable way to have a "free forever" campaign: that there was finite end in both cases on the 2-5 year horizon before we needed to change plans. I advocated against adding the "forever" verbiage knowing this. The first time, I didn't push strongly: it was my mistake.
The second time, I pushed strongly and made sure the entire executive team knew that we would be misleading our users. I pointed to the horizon and talked about the problems with "forever" language. I had to push very strongly back on the marketing team to change verbiage and then they silently made updates anyway to add "forever" verbiage. They were eventually fired for this.
But what I find concerning here isn't that the "free" tier went away (it almost always must) but that there's denial and push-back in this set of threads about the verbiage. You made a mistake. Own it and apologize for the verbiage you put out there. Don't deny that it was ever there or argue over pedantic details about where/how that verbiage was placed.
Indeed. I'm a user of Cloudflare free and Oracle(tm) Always Free(sic) services, but for hobby projects where I'm not under the illusion that they owe me anything.
I think the longevity of Gmail, Youtube etc being both (a) absolutely free and (b) personally critical to many people has rather warped expectations in this regard. Take the freebie, be grateful, but don't imagine that giving no money to a corporation is going to incur any obligation from them to you.
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.
Many of us grew up on stuff like SDF/Freeshell and IRC and ad-supported web hosts. "Free forever" actually meant "free forever" to us, until services that used the same language to make promises ripped us off and turned us more cynical.
So? Maybe don't offer a free tier if you can't sustain it? And many other providers (like Neon, Koyeb, Supabase etc) still offer a free tier. Personally I don't like this type of bait and switch. If you can't sustain something don't offer it in the first place. Same with open source projects going closed source for money after getting free work from open source programmers.
Haha people have sent it to me! I'm currently trying to make it on my own in the wide world though.
I never disagreed with the decision to lay people off to become profitable. That's part of the implicit agreement when you take employment in the US. You can quit whenever you want and they can fire you whenever they want! I knew that going in!
I agreed with it, but of course it stung. That's only natural!
Sam and I are all good though! To his immense credit he reached out to me directly a little while back to mend any hurt feelings, of which I had a few. We're friends. He even came on my podcast and we talked for over an hour like old buds.
I have a lot of feelings and sometimes they get hurt. Sam has a fiduciary responsibility to the company. Today PlanetScale is a going concern and I'm happy and doing great! All is well.
Wow I didn't know he got laid off. I remember watching his videos a few years ago and absolutely loved his way of teaching. He's the reason I found out about PlanetScale to begin with.
Looking at their youtube channel, Aaron's videos had a total of ~1.4m views over 24 videos (an average of ~58k per video). Their recent videos don't even get past 1k views...
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.
@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.
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.
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
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.
free tiers are a subsidy paid by either VCs or paid users that in some cases can function as a marketing cost, if the free tier is time-limited and thus represents a finite cost to the business.
far better to just have transparent pricing that takes customer needs into account. bravo planetscale
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.
I’m not saying that can’t or doesn’t happen but I’ve been using them for about 2 years now and never experienced it. To be fair, my traffic patterns could just not overlap with their outages but wanted to add a data point.
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.
Readit News
Fairly or not, when I see PlanetScale, that’s what I think of.
Seeing the CEO on here defending it as if they nailed the execution of it doesn’t help either.
Though, I wonder with any cloud provider of databases: why?
You’re basically giving your data to a 3rd-party to have access to and to be reliant on.
You have a backup of your source, but I bet many don’t have local non-cloud backups of their databases, maybe because it’s too much data to do easily, and everyone assumes the provider’s backups will suffice. This is a main reason I think that more recognized cloud brands like AWS and Azure are used.
I also had a couple of projects on their hobby plan and the pain of that rug pull made me swear I'd never use them again, no matter the size or context. I would have happily paid like $15 at the time too, but all they offered was a move to their $40+ pm plan. Insane and a terrible way to treat your users.
Irony is, I loved the brand and would have advocated hard for them otherwise.
At the time, their messaging was all about how, "we are for the enterprise and larger customers, not these piddling little poor plebs".
Well I guess they've belatedly realised that plebs turn into managers and future enterprise customers.
They got rid of Aaron Francis too who I thought did excellent work for them.
Dead Comment
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
Well I will remember this. It reflects poorly that your responses are childish when grappling with light criticism. Is this “Founder Mode”?
Imagine building a product for developers and then going on Hacker News telling people to fuck off.
Someone at my job mentioned using PlanetScale recently. I said "I'll check it out" and now I have: the CEO has terrible judgement and is a jerk. Permanent veto.
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.
I am not a customer and not in the market to be a customer anytime soon, I have no horse in this race, just an observation.
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
Deleted Comment
The second time, I pushed strongly and made sure the entire executive team knew that we would be misleading our users. I pointed to the horizon and talked about the problems with "forever" language. I had to push very strongly back on the marketing team to change verbiage and then they silently made updates anyway to add "forever" verbiage. They were eventually fired for this.
But what I find concerning here isn't that the "free" tier went away (it almost always must) but that there's denial and push-back in this set of threads about the verbiage. You made a mistake. Own it and apologize for the verbiage you put out there. Don't deny that it was ever there or argue over pedantic details about where/how that verbiage was placed.
I think the longevity of Gmail, Youtube etc being both (a) absolutely free and (b) personally critical to many people has rather warped expectations in this regard. Take the freebie, be grateful, but don't imagine that giving no money to a corporation is going to incur any obligation from them to you.
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
I didn't enjoy doing it. I felt bad but I don't regret it at all.
He posted this:
"I would like to thank the haters for helping me promote the new PlanetScale $5 plan all day. Thanks guys."
Scorching his reputation on Hacker News is a real 400 IQ movie for a cloud database company CEO.
I never disagreed with the decision to lay people off to become profitable. That's part of the implicit agreement when you take employment in the US. You can quit whenever you want and they can fire you whenever they want! I knew that going in!
I agreed with it, but of course it stung. That's only natural!
Sam and I are all good though! To his immense credit he reached out to me directly a little while back to mend any hurt feelings, of which I had a few. We're friends. He even came on my podcast and we talked for over an hour like old buds.
I have a lot of feelings and sometimes they get hurt. Sam has a fiduciary responsibility to the company. Today PlanetScale is a going concern and I'm happy and doing great! All is well.
The podcast is good btw, y'all should listen!
PlanetScale Postgres with CEO Sam Lambert https://youtu.be/IB3mzON8Iyw
Looking at their youtube channel, Aaron's videos had a total of ~1.4m views over 24 videos (an average of ~58k per video). Their recent videos don't even get past 1k views...
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
Just asking since I find it both the planetscale's engineering and its impact on competitive landscape very interesting.
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.
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.
Also what was capitalism again?
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.
Deleted Comment
far better to just have transparent pricing that takes customer needs into account. bravo planetscale
[1] https://neon.com
Even when a database scales to zero someone still has to pay.
It sure does scale to zero alright...