Hearing a $5 tier on planetscale was cool and I was thinking about using it for a future project, but those specs are just way too low to be worth it for $5/mo. I think I will just get a $5/mo vps with 32x the CPU (probably more as this is 2 x86 cpu cores vs 1/16 arm) and 8x the ram for the same price. The stats, insights and dashboards are cool, but for hobbyist projects that's too steep for the specs you get in my opinion.
I think in fairness it's an apples to oranges comparison.
How long will it take you to setup postgres on a VM and sort out and pay for somewhere to put backups? Let's say only a hour, and your time is worth say $30/hour you've just spent 6 months of planetscale fees and you've still got to pay your VPS and backup provider.
That's one way to look at it. I personally think it's worth burning a few hours to learn how to do something yourself even if you don't immediately get value out of it.
If you want apples to apples then Planetscale is compared to the ergonomics, pricing, and performance of the bests. If you want to compare you don’t analyze things in isolation by looking at your own expenses.
But but the CEO was completely unaware of this until someone pointed it out to him recently! And they never could've predicted the free tier would be "unsustainable" after spending huge on "indie hacker influencer" marketing squarely aimed at exactly the type of dev to use only a free tier! These are some very hard calculations and unforeseen circumstances, please understand.
1/16 of a CPU is admittedly more terrifying, I remember wayyy back in the days of shared hosting we didn't give less than 1/5th a CPU, we had all sorts of issues at absolutely anything higher than that.
Just yesterday I turned off the server for a pet project I had. Postgres had been running unattended for 7 years on Linode. pgdumpall to Backblaze B2 on a nightly crontab, that is it.
Vitess (sharded MySQL) is how they became relevant. But broadly they've spent a lot of time making a great DaaS. There plan is to do the same with Postgres.
Readit News
i know this is apples and oranges but that's 16 times the ram
the difference in price is really the value added by having someone else managing postgresql for you.
How long will it take you to setup postgres on a VM and sort out and pay for somewhere to put backups? Let's say only a hour, and your time is worth say $30/hour you've just spent 6 months of planetscale fees and you've still got to pay your VPS and backup provider.
I guess it is also worth changing marketing tactics for new demographics.
put that on a hertzner, do, lightsail server etc n you have 16x of the compute at the same price n 8x the memory.
pgdumball etc, mysql is even easier but I don't use it.
5 minutes of inactivity makes it idle.
If I get one query every 5 minutes and each query takes 100ms for whole month, do I get changed for 720 hours or for 14 minutes (total compute time)?