8 ms·

Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

samlambert 1y ago
this is great to see. thank you for the write up.
- anthonyronning 1y ago
  Thank you for the great service!
- markskram 1y ago
  thanks for working with us, sam!
asib 1y ago
> Beyond reliability, we faced other challenges: > - 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.
- mrweasel 1y ago
  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?
- gausswho 1y ago
  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.
  - thinkingtoilet 1y ago
    But if your project is getting more and more usage, surely that requires more expenses. What is your alternative?
    - abound 1y ago
      I think GP is calling out the highly non-linear nature of the pricing. $20 for the first TB and then $50/100 GB after is a 25x jump in pricing. Linear usage cost makes sense, but the more common/sane thing is cheaper unit pricing as you hit scale.
      - robertlagrant 1y ago
        Yes - they've inverted it to allow smaller projects to onboard very cheaply.
      - mooreds 1y ago
        > the more common/sane thing is cheaper unit pricing as you hit scale. Depends on the provider's business model. Many devtools want to make it trivial to get started, and zero/low prices facilitate that. They know that once you are set up with the tool, the barrier to moving is high. They also know that devs are tinkerers who may take a free product discovered on their free time and introduce it to a workplace who will pay for it. But someone has to pay for all those free users/plans (they aren't using zero resources). With this business model, the payer is the person/org with some level of success who is forced up into a more expensive plan. This is a valid strategy for two reasons: - such users/orgs are less likely to move because they already have working code using the system and moving introduces risk - if they have high levels of traffic, they may (not certainly, but may) be a profit making enterprise and will do the cold hard calculus of "it costs me $50/100 GB but would take a dev N hours to move and will have X opportunity cost" and decide to keep paying The successful "labor of love" project is an unfortunate casualty.
        Illniyar 1y ago
        It's definitely a business model. Just like a dark pattern is a pattern :) The counter to that argument is that it's creating an adverse effect on your most profitable customers, with an incentive to move to offerings that don't have free tiers (or where the free tiers are not considerably affecting your own costs). If your free tier is so lucrative that you need to 25x the cost, then your free tier is too expansive and you need to tone it down until the economics make sense.
- anthonyronning 1y ago
  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.
  - halfmatthalfcat 1y ago
    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.
    - vasco 1y ago
      It's not a gaslight, but it's only cost effective for specific usage patterns. It's only a "gaslight" if you think you need to run every workload the same way and don't cost estimate before you roll it out.
    - swiftcoder 1y ago
      Serverless is often cheaper just so long as your workflows are bursty/infrequent. For example, we don't need to pay to permanently rent/colocate a beefy server, just to run a batch job once a week. If you have a constant base load of requests, lambda is just the wrong tool for the job.
      - const_cast 1y ago
        Even if it's pretty bursty, usually a perm server is still cheaper. Running the server only half the time isn't burning too much money since AWS is already 10x the cost of raw compute. You need really bursty workloads to make serverless make sense.
        swiftcoder 1y ago
        If we're talking about relatively small workloads, and relatively stable traffic, then sure. But I think for large workloads with unpredictable requirements, the capacity planning alone in a perm setup is a nightmare for most early-stage businesses. Spinning up an extra hundred instances in EC2 takes minutes - getting the same number of boxes installed a colocation facility takes weeks at best
- theamk 1y ago
  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.
- clarkbw 1y ago
  I think this was actually trying to say, Neon prices were high. Because otherwise I agree it doesn't make sense. And Neon will be lowering prices dramatically... a day from now?
vmg12 1y ago
Neon doesnt have usage based pricing it has autoscaling, there is a difference.
- anthonyronning 1y ago
  We get 750 compute hours per month across our entire org, then charged 16c per hour.
  - vmg12 1y ago
    And they are charging per vcpu like every other company. You have control over the autoscaling parameters. Usage based pricing typically implies paying per number of requests.
beoberha 1y ago
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?
- kedihacker 1y ago
  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 https://planetscale.com/metal
  - anthonyronning 1y ago
    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: https://planetscale.com/blog/planetscale-for-postgres https://planetscale.com/blog/planetscale-for-postgres
    - kvirani 1y ago
      Possibly silly question, and not specific to this DB offering, but why is it a good decision to connect to your DB over the Internet vs keeping it in the same data center as your db clients, given the network-latency based performance hit I believe it causes?
      - kedihacker 1y ago
        They usually deployed to the same region like any other database not colocated with the clients. With vpc peering there should be no difference.
  - gnaman 1y ago
    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
cl0ckt0wer 1y ago
They can't afford database administration? Is it that expensive to hire a DBA?
- anthonyronning 1y ago
  Pre-seed stage startup of two people. No, we can't hire a DBA.
  - Insanity 1y ago
    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.
    - anthonyronning 1y ago
      Thank you! Yes, totally agree. I do hope to get there one day and would LOVE nothing more than to have a DBA take this to the next steps when we're bigger.
    - markskram 1y ago
      the temptation to do it all yourself is strong when you're technically capable. but offloading to managed solutions is a huge benefit
- dizhn 1y ago
  They listed some prices. It's like $150 per month.
gr4vityWall 1y ago
> 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.
- samlambert 1y ago
  if it's going down and causing reputation damage then $1 a month is too expensive.
- anthonyronning 1y ago
  > And 250 dollars/month was considered expensive 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.
  - gr4vityWall 1y ago
    No problem. I appreciate the technical details of your article. Best of luck to your startup.
- markskram 1y ago
  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
Insanity 1y ago
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).
- samlambert 1y ago
  I'd be happy to show you around PlanetScale if there is interest.
- vlucas 1y ago
  It's not about the $250 being too expensive. It's about feeling like you're not getting a good value - being overcharged for a subpar product. Quote from the article: > At $250/month for 4 databases without any replicas, we were paying premium prices for subpar reliability.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jmull 1y ago
I realize this wasn't the main reason they switched, but from my perspective, $156/mo and $250/mo for db is essentially the same number: Way too much for a project without a budget, and approximately zero for a project with a budget.
- acedTrex 1y ago
  On any project ive ever worked on 156 -> 250 is a rounding error lol. Thats not even enough to both thinking about.
- markskram 1y ago
  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.
unixhero 1y ago
I am bullish on fly.io
- xmorse 1y ago
  I am not. No one ever heard of their managed postgres and they already started calling it with an acronym
  - unixhero 1y ago
    It could be that you have legitimate concerns regarding fly.io, things that I have not considered. But I for one see zero acronyms on their managed postgres product information page: https://fly.io/docs/mpg/ https://fly.io/docs/mpg/ * * Except in the url
xmorse 1y ago
The answer is an open secret
- markskram 1y ago
  ;)
josephd79 1y ago
I thought PlantScale's postgres option was still in early access mode?
- samlambert 1y ago
  It is but we've been giving people access. If you are interested then email postgres@planetscale.com
jxi 1y ago
TiDB is another option in this space which claims to be even cheaper and auto-scaling than PlanetScale.

this is great to see. thank you for the write up.

anthonyronning 1y ago
Thank you for the great service!
markskram 1y ago
thanks for working with us, sam!

asib 1y ago

> Beyond reliability, we faced other challenges: > - 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.

mrweasel 1y ago
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?
gausswho 1y ago
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.
- thinkingtoilet 1y ago
  But if your project is getting more and more usage, surely that requires more expenses. What is your alternative?
  - abound 1y ago
    I think GP is calling out the highly non-linear nature of the pricing. $20 for the first TB and then $50/100 GB after is a 25x jump in pricing. Linear usage cost makes sense, but the more common/sane thing is cheaper unit pricing as you hit scale.
    - robertlagrant 1y ago
      Yes - they've inverted it to allow smaller projects to onboard very cheaply.
    - mooreds 1y ago
      > the more common/sane thing is cheaper unit pricing as you hit scale. Depends on the provider's business model. Many devtools want to make it trivial to get started, and zero/low prices facilitate that. They know that once you are set up with the tool, the barrier to moving is high. They also know that devs are tinkerers who may take a free product discovered on their free time and introduce it to a workplace who will pay for it. But someone has to pay for all those free users/plans (they aren't using zero resources). With this business model, the payer is the person/org with some level of success who is forced up into a more expensive plan. This is a valid strategy for two reasons: - such users/orgs are less likely to move because they already have working code using the system and moving introduces risk - if they have high levels of traffic, they may (not certainly, but may) be a profit making enterprise and will do the cold hard calculus of "it costs me $50/100 GB but would take a dev N hours to move and will have X opportunity cost" and decide to keep paying The successful "labor of love" project is an unfortunate casualty.
      - Illniyar 1y ago
        It's definitely a business model. Just like a dark pattern is a pattern :) The counter to that argument is that it's creating an adverse effect on your most profitable customers, with an incentive to move to offerings that don't have free tiers (or where the free tiers are not considerably affecting your own costs). If your free tier is so lucrative that you need to 25x the cost, then your free tier is too expansive and you need to tone it down until the economics make sense.
anthonyronning 1y ago
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.
- halfmatthalfcat 1y ago
  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.
  - vasco 1y ago
    It's not a gaslight, but it's only cost effective for specific usage patterns. It's only a "gaslight" if you think you need to run every workload the same way and don't cost estimate before you roll it out.
  - swiftcoder 1y ago
    Serverless is often cheaper just so long as your workflows are bursty/infrequent. For example, we don't need to pay to permanently rent/colocate a beefy server, just to run a batch job once a week. If you have a constant base load of requests, lambda is just the wrong tool for the job.
    - const_cast 1y ago
      Even if it's pretty bursty, usually a perm server is still cheaper. Running the server only half the time isn't burning too much money since AWS is already 10x the cost of raw compute. You need really bursty workloads to make serverless make sense.
      - swiftcoder 1y ago
        If we're talking about relatively small workloads, and relatively stable traffic, then sure. But I think for large workloads with unpredictable requirements, the capacity planning alone in a perm setup is a nightmare for most early-stage businesses. Spinning up an extra hundred instances in EC2 takes minutes - getting the same number of boxes installed a colocation facility takes weeks at best
theamk 1y ago
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.
clarkbw 1y ago
I think this was actually trying to say, Neon prices were high. Because otherwise I agree it doesn't make sense. And Neon will be lowering prices dramatically... a day from now?

vmg12 1y ago

Neon doesnt have usage based pricing it has autoscaling, there is a difference.

anthonyronning 1y ago
We get 750 compute hours per month across our entire org, then charged 16c per hour.
- vmg12 1y ago
  And they are charging per vcpu like every other company. You have control over the autoscaling parameters. Usage based pricing typically implies paying per number of requests.

beoberha 1y ago

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?

kedihacker 1y ago
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 https://planetscale.com/metal
- anthonyronning 1y ago
  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: https://planetscale.com/blog/planetscale-for-postgres https://planetscale.com/blog/planetscale-for-postgres
  - kvirani 1y ago
    Possibly silly question, and not specific to this DB offering, but why is it a good decision to connect to your DB over the Internet vs keeping it in the same data center as your db clients, given the network-latency based performance hit I believe it causes?
    - kedihacker 1y ago
      They usually deployed to the same region like any other database not colocated with the clients. With vpc peering there should be no difference.
- gnaman 1y ago
  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

cl0ckt0wer 1y ago

They can't afford database administration? Is it that expensive to hire a DBA?

anthonyronning 1y ago
Pre-seed stage startup of two people. No, we can't hire a DBA.
- Insanity 1y ago
  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.
  - anthonyronning 1y ago
    Thank you! Yes, totally agree. I do hope to get there one day and would LOVE nothing more than to have a DBA take this to the next steps when we're bigger.
  - markskram 1y ago
    the temptation to do it all yourself is strong when you're technically capable. but offloading to managed solutions is a huge benefit
dizhn 1y ago
They listed some prices. It's like $150 per month.

gr4vityWall 1y ago

> 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.

samlambert 1y ago
if it's going down and causing reputation damage then $1 a month is too expensive.
anthonyronning 1y ago
> And 250 dollars/month was considered expensive 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.
- gr4vityWall 1y ago
  No problem. I appreciate the technical details of your article. Best of luck to your startup.
markskram 1y ago
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

Insanity 1y ago

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).

samlambert 1y ago
I'd be happy to show you around PlanetScale if there is interest.
vlucas 1y ago
It's not about the $250 being too expensive. It's about feeling like you're not getting a good value - being overcharged for a subpar product. Quote from the article: > At $250/month for 4 databases without any replicas, we were paying premium prices for subpar reliability.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

jmull 1y ago

I realize this wasn't the main reason they switched, but from my perspective, $156/mo and $250/mo for db is essentially the same number: Way too much for a project without a budget, and approximately zero for a project with a budget.

acedTrex 1y ago
On any project ive ever worked on 156 -> 250 is a rounding error lol. Thats not even enough to both thinking about.
markskram 1y ago
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.

unixhero 1y ago

I am bullish on fly.io

xmorse 1y ago
I am not. No one ever heard of their managed postgres and they already started calling it with an acronym
- unixhero 1y ago
  It could be that you have legitimate concerns regarding fly.io, things that I have not considered. But I for one see zero acronyms on their managed postgres product information page: https://fly.io/docs/mpg/ https://fly.io/docs/mpg/ * * Except in the url

xmorse 1y ago

The answer is an open secret

markskram 1y ago
;)

josephd79 1y ago

I thought PlantScale's postgres option was still in early access mode?

samlambert 1y ago
It is but we've been giving people access. If you are interested then email postgres@planetscale.com

jxi 1y ago

TiDB is another option in this space which claims to be even cheaper and auto-scaling than PlanetScale.