PlanetScale

PlanetScale is a fully managed database platform that pairs a Vitess-based MySQL service with a new Metal-powered Postgres offering, all wrapped in a developer experience built around Git-style branching and zero-downtime schema migrations. We rate it 82/100 — if you need serious database performance, branching workflows, and don't mind the $39/month minimum since the Hobby tier was retired, PlanetScale is the most polished managed Postgres or MySQL on the market.

What is PlanetScale?

PlanetScale is a managed database platform founded in 2018 by Jiten Vaidya and Sugu Sougoumarane, the two former YouTube engineers who created Vitess — the database scaling system that runs YouTube, Slack, Square, and GitHub internally. The company is led today by CEO Sam Lambert and is headquartered in San Francisco. PlanetScale started as a managed Vitess (sharded MySQL) cloud, opened to general availability in June 2021, and dramatically widened its scope on September 22, 2025 when it shipped PlanetScale for Postgres in general availability.

The specific problem PlanetScale solves is that running a high-performance OLTP database on a shared cloud node is brutal: noisy neighbors, network-attached storage I/O ceilings, and operational fire-drills around schema changes. PlanetScale's answer is two-pronged. First, PlanetScale Metal — databases that run on dedicated hosts with local NVMe drives, marketed as "unlimited I/O" because customers exhaust CPU long before they touch the disk ceiling. Second, a Git-flow branching model where every schema change is a deploy request that gets reviewed, tested, and shipped without locking the production table.

Key Features of PlanetScale

• PlanetScale Metal: Dedicated hosts with local NVMe storage, available for both Vitess and Postgres. Internal benchmarks claim sub-millisecond p99 latency on read paths and roughly 5× the throughput of equivalent RDS/Aurora instances at similar price points.
• Database branching: Every schema change starts in an isolated branch with full data, gets a deploy request with diff review, and ships via non-blocking schema migration. The same flow that made GitHub work, applied to MySQL DDL.
• Managed sharded Postgres via Neki: The PlanetScale team is rebuilding their sharding engine from first principles for Postgres — not a Vitess fork — called Neki, with design partners running it in production today.
• Insights and Query Performance: Built-in p50/p95/p99 latency tracking per query, automatic slow-query detection, and an explain plan UI — no separate APM bill needed for database observability.
• Postgres 18 support: PlanetScale shipped Postgres 18 within weeks of upstream, including the new asynchronous I/O subsystem and skip-scan index support.
• Database Traffic Control: Resource budgets per query class to keep a runaway analytical query from starving production traffic — addressing a legitimate complaint about row-read billing surprises.
• Connection pooling and proxy layer: Proprietary proxy with query buffering, automatic failover, and pooling built in — no PgBouncer sidecar to operate.
• PlanetScale Managed: For regulated enterprises, deploy into your own AWS or GCP account while PlanetScale operates the cluster on shared Slack channels and bi-weekly architecture reviews.

What Users Say About PlanetScale

On Hacker News, the September 2025 Postgres GA thread surfaced strong technical praise — commenters who had run benchmarks called Metal "the first managed Postgres that doesn't get punished by I/O" — alongside lingering bitterness about the March 2024 removal of the free Hobby tier, which many bootstrappers and side-project builders never recovered from. On G2 the average rating sits around 4.6/5, with reviewers consistently calling out branching, deploy requests, and customer support; the recurring complaints are about row-read billing surprises (now mitigated by Database Traffic Control) and the entry-level price floor. Convex publicly migrated their entire production workload to PlanetScale for Postgres in a 2025 case study, and named customers include Cursor, Intercom, and Block.

PlanetScale Pricing

PlanetScale split its plans by database type and resource model in 2025. There is no free production tier — Hobby was retired in March 2024 — but Postgres entry pricing was lowered to $5/month in late 2025.

Plan	Price	Best For
Free trial	$0 (limited time)	Evaluating PlanetScale before committing
Postgres single	$5/month	Low-traffic Postgres production workloads
PS-5 (Vitess/Postgres)	$15/month	Standard production workloads
Metal HA	$50/month and up	High-performance, dedicated NVMe production
Enterprise	Custom	SSO, audit logging, dedicated support, PlanetScale Managed

Who Should Use PlanetScale?

Best for: Series A through later-stage startups and engineering teams running production OLTP workloads where database performance is on the critical path, teams that value Git-style schema migration workflows, and any company that has outgrown shared-tenant Postgres on AWS RDS or Aurora.

Not ideal for: Hobbyists, side projects, and bootstrappers under $40/month database budgets — Neon or Supabase remain the right choice. Also a poor fit for teams that need analytical queries on the same primary, where a separate warehouse will serve better.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Metal's local NVMe storage genuinely outperforms network-attached managed alternatives in published and reproduced benchmarks.
• Database branching workflow has no real equivalent in the managed Postgres market — Neon's branches are close but lack the deploy-request review primitive.
• Customers like Cursor and Intercom are running production traffic on it at scale, validating the operational story.
• Postgres 18 shipped within weeks of upstream — a clear signal of platform engineering velocity.

Cons:

• $39+ minimum monthly spend means there is no path for hobby or evaluation usage past the trial.
• Row-read billing model can surprise teams that don't budget queries carefully — though Database Traffic Control helps.
• Sharded Postgres (Neki) is still pre-release, so single-shard Postgres is what's actually in production today.
• The 2024 Hobby-tier removal damaged community goodwill in a way the company is still working to repair.

Alternatives to PlanetScale

Neon — serverless Postgres with branching and a generous free tier, but built on networked storage; better for hobbyists and Vercel-shaped workloads. Supabase — open-source Postgres-plus-backend with auth, storage, and realtime baked in; broader scope but less raw database performance focus. AWS Aurora — the incumbent managed MySQL/Postgres on AWS; cheaper at small scale, slower at large scale, and missing branching entirely.

Verdict: Is PlanetScale Worth It?

For production teams who care about p99 query latency and want a managed database with real branching workflows, PlanetScale is the most credible option in 2026 — and the Postgres GA closes the door on the "but I want Postgres" objection that defined the previous five years. We rate it 82/100: held back from a higher score only by the $39/month price floor that locks out hobbyists and the still-fresh memory of the Hobby tier removal. Pay the entry fee, run Metal, and you'll find very few managed databases that match it on speed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is PlanetScale free?

No. PlanetScale removed its free Hobby tier in March 2024. Paid plans now start at $5/month for a single Postgres database, with most production teams landing on the $15/month PS-5 or $50/month Metal HA plans. A free trial is available for evaluation.

Does PlanetScale support Postgres?

Yes. PlanetScale for Postgres reached general availability on September 22, 2025. Postgres 18 is supported, and pricing starts at $5/month for the single-instance plan.

How does PlanetScale compare to Neon?

Neon is a true serverless Postgres with a generous free tier and instant branching, ideal for hobbyists and Vercel deployments. PlanetScale targets production workloads with dedicated NVMe-backed Metal hardware, has a $5+/month minimum, and now offers branching for Postgres as well. Choose Neon for cost and ergonomics; choose PlanetScale for raw performance.

Is PlanetScale open source?

The platform itself is closed source, but the underlying Vitess scaling layer is Apache 2.0 licensed at github.com/vitessio/vitess, and the upcoming Neki Postgres sharder will be open-sourced when it stabilizes.

What customers run PlanetScale in production?

Named production customers include Cursor, Intercom, Block, Convex, Supermemory, and Layers. The platform has been GA since June 2021 for MySQL/Vitess and September 2025 for Postgres.