PlanetScale vs Stripe
Serverless MySQL (Vitess) and Postgres at scale
vs. Payments, subscriptions, fraud protection, and financial infrastructure
Pricing tiers
PlanetScale
Postgres EBS single-node — PS-5
Single-node EBS, 512 MiB RAM, arm64. Entry point for Postgres.
$5/mo
Postgres EBS HA — PS-5
3-node (primary + 2 replicas), 512 MiB, arm64.
$15/mo
Vitess (non-Metal) — PS-10
Vitess MySQL sharded cluster, 1 GiB RAM.
$39/mo
Postgres Metal — M-10
3-node Metal, 1 GiB RAM + 10 GiB local storage. Much higher IOPS.
$50/mo
Vitess Metal — M-160
Vitess Metal, 16 GiB RAM + 110 GiB storage.
$609/mo
Enterprise
Custom agreements, dedicated regions, 99.99% SLA.
Custom
Stripe
Payments (Pay-as-you-go)
Default pricing: 2.9% + 30¢ per domestic card transaction. No setup/monthly fees.
$0 base (usage-based)
Billing (Pay-as-you-go)
0.7% of billing volume (on top of payment fees). Stripe-hosted subscription + invoice management.
$0 base (usage-based)
Billing (Monthly plan)
Starting $620/month with 1-year contract. Discount on high volumes.
$620/mo
Enterprise / Custom
Volume discounts + IC+ pricing (interchange-plus) available at scale.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing pg-ebs-nonha-starter on PlanetScale vs payments-payg on Stripe.
| Metric | PlanetScale | Stripe |
|---|---|---|
| ha | 0 nodes | — |
| ram mib | 512 MiB | — |
Features
PlanetScale · 12 features
- Backups — Automated daily backups with retention.
- Database Branching — Git-like branches of your DB schema (not data). Create, diff, merge via deploy r…
- Deploy Requests — Schema changes in a feature branch get reviewed + auto-applied to main with zero…
- HIPAA — HIPAA-compliant deployments (Enterprise).
- Metal (NVMe) — Dedicated NVMe local storage. 10x IOPS vs EBS, latency-critical workloads.
- PgBouncer Pooler — Managed PgBouncer for Postgres clusters. Optional dedicated pooler.
- PlanetScale Boost — Query result cache with sub-ms reads.
- Point-in-Time Recovery — Restore cluster to any point within retention window.
- Postgres on PlanetScale — PostgreSQL 15+ with the same branching + deploy-request flow. Launched 2024.
- Query Insights — Per-query performance analytics, slow query tracking, explain plans.
- Read-only Regions — Route reads to the nearest region for lower latency.
- Vitess (MySQL at scale) — Horizontally-sharded MySQL (YouTube-scale) — original PlanetScale offering.
Stripe · 17 features
- Atlas — Incorporate a US Delaware C-Corp in minutes.
- Billing (Subscriptions) — Recurring invoices, trials, proration, metered billing, tax-included.
- Climate — Route % of revenue to carbon removal.
- Connect — Multi-party payments for marketplaces/platforms. Express, Custom, Standard accou…
- Data Pipeline — Nightly sync of Stripe data to your warehouse (Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, S3…
- Identity — Document + selfie verification for KYC.
- Invoicing — One-off invoices with hosted pages + reminders.
- Issuing — Issue virtual/physical cards programmatically.
- Payments — Core card + wallet (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Link) + bank payment processing.
- Radar (Fraud) — ML-based fraud detection. Teams tier for custom rules.
- Sigma — SQL analytics over your Stripe data.
- Stripe Checkout — Hosted prebuilt checkout page. Zero UI work.
- Stripe Elements — Pre-styled UI components for custom checkout flows.
- Stripe Tax — Auto-calc sales tax, VAT, GST across jurisdictions + reporting.
- Terminal (In-Person) — Card readers + SDKs for POS and mobile payments.
- Treasury — Embedded banking — accounts, ACH, issuing cards via platform.
- Webhooks — Event notifications for all resource changes. Signed with webhook secret.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | PlanetScale | Stripe |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | PlanetScale CLI (pscale) | Stripe CLI |
| SDK | @planetscale/database | stripe-dotnet, stripe-go, stripe-java, stripe-js (client), stripe-node, stripe-php, stripe-python, @stripe/react-stripe-js, stripe-ruby |
| REST | Management API | Stripe REST API |
| MCP | PlanetScale MCP | Stripe MCP |
| OTHER | MySQL Wire Protocol, Postgres Wire Protocol | Webhook Events |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to PlanetScale and Stripe are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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