dbaas
PlanetScale
Serverless MySQL (Vitess) and Postgres at scale
Cluster-based serverless DB: MySQL (Vitess, sharding) + Postgres. Deploy requests, branching, connection pooling, Metal high-perf tier. No free tier since 2024.
Pricing
| Tier | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Postgres EBS single-node — PS-5 | $5/mo | Single-node EBS, 512 MiB RAM, arm64. Entry point for Postgres. |
| Postgres EBS HA — PS-5 | $15/mo | 3-node (primary + 2 replicas), 512 MiB, arm64. |
| Vitess (non-Metal) — PS-10 | $39/mo | Vitess MySQL sharded cluster, 1 GiB RAM. |
| Postgres Metal — M-10 | $50/mo | 3-node Metal, 1 GiB RAM + 10 GiB local storage. Much higher IOPS. |
| Vitess Metal — M-160 | $609/mo | Vitess Metal, 16 GiB RAM + 110 GiB storage. |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom agreements, dedicated regions, 99.99% SLA. |
Limits
| Tier | Metric | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| — | branches per database | unlimited (bound by cost) | Database branches |
| — | free tier | 0 tier | No free tier since April 2024 |
| — | max cluster size usd mo | $94,429 (M-15360 Metal, 1536 GiB RAM, 122 TB storage) | Largest published cluster |
| — | pricing model | cluster-size + storage (EBS) + backups + egress + optional dedicated PgBouncer + optional replicas | Cluster-based pricing |
| — | regions | AWS + GCP global, multi-region Metal | Global regions |
| pg-ebs-ha-starter | ram mib | 512 MiB | PS-5 HA RAM |
| pg-ebs-ha-starter | replicas | 2 nodes | Replicas |
| pg-ebs-nonha-starter | ha | 0 nodes | Single-node (no replicas) |
| pg-ebs-nonha-starter | ram mib | 512 MiB | PS-5 RAM |
| pg-metal-starter | ram gib | 1 GiB | Metal M-10 RAM |
| pg-metal-starter | storage gib | 10 GiB | Metal M-10 local NVMe |
| vitess-metal-starter | ram gib | 16 GiB | Vitess Metal M-160 RAM |
| vitess-metal-starter | storage gib | 110 GiB | Vitess Metal M-160 storage |
| vitess-nonmetal-starter | ram gib | 1 GiB | Vitess PS-10 RAM |
Features
- Backups — Automated daily backups with retention.
- Database Branching — Git-like branches of your DB schema (not data). Create, diff, merge via deploy requests. · docs
- Deploy Requests — Schema changes in a feature branch get reviewed + auto-applied to main with zero downtime. · docs
- HIPAA — HIPAA-compliant deployments (Enterprise).
- Metal (NVMe) — Dedicated NVMe local storage. 10x IOPS vs EBS, latency-critical workloads. · docs
- PgBouncer Pooler — Managed PgBouncer for Postgres clusters. Optional dedicated pooler.
- PlanetScale Boost — Query result cache with sub-ms reads. · docs
- 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. · docs
- Query Insights — Per-query performance analytics, slow query tracking, explain plans. · docs
- Read-only Regions — Route reads to the nearest region for lower latency.
- Vitess (MySQL at scale) — Horizontally-sharded MySQL (YouTube-scale) — original PlanetScale offering. · docs
Developer interfaces
| Slug | Name | Kind | Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| mgmt-api | Management API | rest | v1 |
| mysql-wire | MySQL Wire Protocol | other | mysql8 |
| cli | PlanetScale CLI (pscale) | cli | 0.x |
| sdk-serverless | @planetscale/database | sdk | 1.x |
| mcp | PlanetScale MCP | mcp | — |
| pg-wire | Postgres Wire Protocol | other | pg |
Compare PlanetScale with
ai-api
PlanetScale vs Anthropic API
Side-by-side breakdown.
ai-api
PlanetScale vs AssemblyAI
Side-by-side breakdown.
ai-api
PlanetScale vs Deepgram
Side-by-side breakdown.
ai-api
PlanetScale vs ElevenLabs
Side-by-side breakdown.
ai-api
PlanetScale vs Google Gemini API
Side-by-side breakdown.
ai-api
PlanetScale vs Groq
Side-by-side breakdown.
ai-api
PlanetScale vs OpenAI API
Side-by-side breakdown.
ai-api
PlanetScale vs Replicate
Side-by-side breakdown.
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to PlanetScale are plain references to their official pages. Pricing is verified at publication time — reconfirm on the vendor site before buying.