PlanetScale is the database for teams that have genuinely outgrown a single primary and need horizontal scale without running Vitess themselves. Branching and deploy requests remain the best schema workflow in the category. The April 2024 free tier removal burned hobbyists and sent them to Neon, but the platform was never really aimed at them. With Postgres now GA and a $5 floor, it is a solid pick for production workloads at scale, less so for side projects.
- Vitess-backed MySQL scales horizontally to very large workloads
- Branching: schema changes ship as reviewable deploy requests
- Now offers managed Postgres, not MySQL-only
- Metal runs on local NVMe for unlimited I/O performance
- Online schema changes with zero-downtime, no table locks
- No free tier since April 2024, lowest paid entry is $5/mo
- MySQL on Vitess restricts foreign keys and some SQL features
- Not self-hostable, Vitess is OSS but the platform is proprietary
- Pricing scales with usage, can climb fast at high traffic
- Postgres sharding (Neki) is still in development
PlanetScale is a managed database platform built for horizontal scale. It started as serverless MySQL on top of Vitess, the clustering system YouTube built to shard MySQL, and added managed Postgres in 2025. The pitch is database-level scale with a Git-style schema workflow, aimed at teams whose data has outgrown a single server.
Where it fits
PlanetScale fits teams that have hit the ceiling of a single Postgres or MySQL primary and need to scale writes across shards without operating the infrastructure by hand. The MySQL offering runs on Vitess, so it can spread a large dataset across many nodes while presenting a single logical database.
The signature feature is schema branching. Schema changes happen on a branch, then ship to production as a deploy request that runs an online, lock-free migration. That workflow treats the database schema like code, which is rare in this space. As of 2025, PlanetScale also offers managed Postgres, so the platform is no longer MySQL-only. It is a fit for teams that want scale and a reviewable migration process, less so for a quick side project that needs a free database.
Pricing in practice
PlanetScale retired its free Hobby tier on April 8, 2024, and the move drew loud criticism. Independent developers who relied on the free database had to either move to a paid plan, which started at $39/month at the time, or migrate elsewhere. Many went to Neon, which kept a generous free tier. CEO Sam Lambert framed the decision around the company serving large enterprises rather than giving away resources.
Pricing has since softened at the low end. The Base plan is pay-as-you-go with single-node databases starting at $5/month, introduced in November 2025, with the first 10 GB of storage included and $0.50/GB after. Metal clusters on local NVMe start around $50/month. Enterprise is custom and adds bring-your-own-cloud deployment and dedicated support. There is still no free tier, so PlanetScale is for production workloads with a budget, not for learning or hobby projects.
How it compares
Neon, serverless Postgres with branching, autoscaling, and a real free tier. The default destination for developers who left PlanetScale in 2024. Pick when you want Postgres with a free entry point.
Supabase, Postgres plus auth, storage, and realtime as a full backend. Pick when you want batteries-included app infrastructure rather than a pure scaling database.
MySQL, the open-source engine PlanetScale is built on. Pick when you want to self-host or avoid the Vitess constraints on foreign keys and certain SQL features.
What changed recently
PlanetScale spent 2025 moving beyond MySQL. Metal, its NVMe-backed offering promising unlimited I/O, reached general availability in October 2025. PlanetScale for Postgres entered private preview on July 1, 2025, hit general availability on September 22, 2025, and gained $5 single-node databases across the fleet on November 14, 2025. The Postgres offering runs real Postgres on a proprietary operator, not a fork of Vitess, with a separate sharding project called Neki still in development. The throughline: the platform pivoted from MySQL-only scaling toward a broader managed database company while keeping branching and Metal as its differentiators.
Sources
- Announcing PlanetScale for Postgres, planetscale.com, July 2025
- PlanetScale for Postgres is now Generally Available, planetscale.com, September 2025
- Deprecating the Hobby plan, planetscale.com, March 2024
- PlanetScale ends free tier services and chops some staff, theregister.com, March 2024
- PlanetScale Extends Database Platform to PostgreSQL, infoq.com, October 2025