PlanetScale for MySQL at Scale (Managed for Enterprise)

My main use case for PlanetScale  is to deploy MySQL  and Postgres databases. Earlier, PlanetScale  only offered MySQL  and did not offer Postgres. Because I work with many startups, I recommend PlanetScale because it makes deploying easy, monitoring easy, and logging easy. It is straightforward to see query insights and use recommendations from PlanetScale to improve performance.

When PlanetScale makes deploying and monitoring easy, it allows me to manage my own MySQL without using tools such as Vitess and having a primary database with read replicas. Instead of doing all that, in PlanetScale, using only the UI, we can configure the number of read replicas that we need and it will automatically handle copying data from the primary database to read replicas. Deploying becomes extremely easy. Additionally, creating branches of the database for different environments is straightforward. Most startups use two to three environments, so we can use three different branches on PlanetScale and maintain three different environments.

Regarding my main use case and how I use PlanetScale, databases are where bottlenecks in scaling occur. PlanetScale shows which queries take a long time to execute and provides recommendations on adding or removing indexes. Often, if you add too many indexes, the database starts working slowly. PlanetScale provides recommendations to both add some indexes as well as change or remove some indexes. This way, we can achieve better performance while keeping resource usage small, without adding more RAM or processor capacity to the database.

In my opinion, the best features PlanetScale offers are recommendations and statistics on queries.

Insights on queries have helped me and my teams significantly. For example, once while I was a CTO at Commutech, I received insights from a query that showed one specific query which checked permissions was selecting all permissions for a user instead of selecting a specific row. This increased the load on the database. Receiving that one insight helped me rewrite that query to only select the permission that needed to be checked, which made scaling possible. Such insights that pinpoint exact problems help in resolving scaling issues.

PlanetScale positively impacts my organization by greatly improving productivity and saving significant costs. Typically, if I were to manage my own database, I would need someone to manage that infrastructure, keep updating things, and maintain backups. PlanetScale handles all of that, including backups. We can restore to a point in time using PlanetScale. All these things would normally require a specially skilled person to manage a database. Instead of that, we can have the full-stack developer developing the product manage the database themselves instead of hiring a specialized person just for management. Rather than spending on a DevOps person, we can spend that budget on a developer and build more features instead of spending money on just maintaining infrastructure.

PlanetScale solves most of the issues I would have faced if I were not using it, so there is nothing specific that I would like to add within PlanetScale.

Regarding needed improvements, I wish PlanetScale would have a free tier so that startups could try it and then opt in for a paid feature. Earlier they did offer a free tier, but now they do not have any free tier. It could be as small as even 200 megabytes of data that would suffice. However, there needs to be some free tier so that people can try it out.

I have been using PlanetScale for around three to four years.

In my experience, PlanetScale is very stable.

PlanetScale's scalability is amazing. It scales very easily with hardly any human effort involved.

I used AWS  as my primary provider and used RDS  before PlanetScale, but the minimum pricing for RDS  itself is 12 lakh rupees per year, whereas in PlanetScale we calculated it would be around 30,000 rupees a year. That is a significant difference. I had to switch because of monetary reasons. The savings exceed 99 percent for any person who switches from AWS  RDS to PlanetScale.

Typically, when a startup starts, in the initial first year the scale is not high enough. We have to spend on PlanetScale, roughly $20 to $25 per month. So $25 per month becomes around $300, which is approximately 30,000 rupees. Whereas a developer would have cost me around 50 lakhs plus the infrastructure cost, approximately 12 to 15 lakhs. That totals 65 lakhs, and I only have to spend 30,000 rupees on this. Typically when I use PlanetScale, in the first year I save at least 64 lakh rupees.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that pricing is good enough to be used at enterprise level. It is not cheap, but it is appropriately priced. I do not find it costly at all.

Before choosing PlanetScale, I tried Neon  and Supabase, but their reliability was inconsistent. Especially with Neon , the reliability was too low. All the applications I usually build need high uptime, which is not the case with Supabase and Neon, and therefore I had to choose PlanetScale.

Specific outcomes or metrics show direct savings that I observe since switching to PlanetScale. On a scale of one to ten, I give PlanetScale a ten because ease of use stands out to me most.

The best features PlanetScale offers are recommendations and statistics on queries. Insights on queries have helped me and my teams significantly. For example, once while I was a CTO at Commutech, I received insights from a query that showed one specific query which checked permissions was selecting all permissions for a user instead of selecting a specific row. This increased the load on the database. Receiving that one insight helped me rewrite that query to only select the permission that needed to be checked, which made scaling possible. Such insights that pinpoint exact problems help in resolving scaling issues.

I have never needed to reach out for customer support, so I cannot evaluate it.

PlanetScale positively impacts my organization by greatly improving productivity and saving significant costs. Typically, if I were to manage my own database, I would need someone to manage that infrastructure, keep updating things, and maintain backups. PlanetScale handles all of that, including backups, and we can restore to a point in time using PlanetScale. All these things would normally require a specially skilled person to manage a database. Instead of that, we can have the full-stack developer developing the product manage the database themselves instead of hiring a specialized person just for management. Rather than spending on a DevOps person, we can spend that budget on a developer and build more features instead of spending money on just maintaining infrastructure.

PlanetScale's performance under heavy workload is incredible. Essentially, our job is to increase its size or the number of read replicas when it performs poorly. However, so far performance has not been an issue.

If someone from PlanetScale is reading this, I strongly recommend that they bring back their free tier so that people can try it out more. Additionally, it would be very helpful for people doing hobby projects. Because it is not always easily possible to keep paying a recurring charge for hobby projects. Having some kind of a hobby tier would be tremendously helpful. I have rated this product a ten out of ten.

My main use case for PlanetScale  is that currently, in the company, we are considering changing our current local database to PlanetScale  for stability and other benefits, but it has not been deployed yet. We are still testing things and checking on how it will work. There are some issues.

For testing PlanetScale, along with the issues, it is mostly because of the technology behind it. We are changing from a local MySQL  database, a simple database, to PlanetScale, which is a different technology that scales MySQL  databases up. However, some features are either limited or completely blocked. We had to adapt the code to those restrictions. It was possible to do it. Recently we started noticing that because of the distance between the database and the server and our particular field, there may be some lagging and that may not be acceptable. We are still not sure if we are going to go ahead with PlanetScale because of that. However, it is not an issue with PlanetScale, it is an issue with our service and our product.

Regarding my main use case or the testing process so far, mostly because we require really fast and snap responses, we have to remove every sort of lagging that we may have. Again, it is not really PlanetScale issues, but we are still trying things out.

In my opinion, one of the best features PlanetScale offers is the ability to lock all changes to the database, so no particular developer can do changes that could break things for others. We have an admin panel with many features and ways to do things in a more manageable way. It is essentially like a GitHub  but for databases.

PlanetScale has impacted my organization positively so far, even in this testing phase, because the versioning is something we are getting used to, and I suppose that helps. However, it is only testing, so there were no changes on the product itself in production or to our clients.

Regarding how PlanetScale could be improved, especially considering my experience so far, if it were possible to handle the lagging problem, I suppose it is something that cannot really be changed besides hosting it in other places. The limits of the technology itself are a consideration. I suppose there is not much to do about that. I think it is all fine overall. The features are pretty complete. Are there things that I may not be using? Of course. Overall it looks good.

Regarding needed improvements, I have not touched much on the advanced features. We are just using it for essentially basic parts and it works as intended. Nothing more comes to mind.

I have been using PlanetScale for about three months.

Overall, PlanetScale is stable in my experience so far. There is not much more to say because it is early testing.

PlanetScale's scalability from what I have seen so far is that the main thing we wanted to use PlanetScale for is exactly the scalability, which we currently do not really have. Since it is only early staging, we cannot really tell about it. We cannot really see anything about that.

I have not interacted with customer support at all. However, my boss and manager did, and according to him, things like migration from the database were much better than what we currently have. According to him, there were no issues. It was probably one of the reasons why he selected PlanetScale.

We have been using a normal local database on the same server that the service is being hosted. We are trying to deploy a new version of our product and that version would use PlanetScale by default intentionally. However, because of these recent issues, we are not sure about it.

Considering it is only in the early testing phase, there were no benefits or returns.

I do not think we evaluated other options before choosing PlanetScale.

For others looking into using PlanetScale, I think that for something like version control on a database, it looks pretty good. It has many monitors, so you can see errors, problems, other situations, processing, and memory. That is really interesting and very easy to control. However, on our case, when you are moving from a local database to a more spread one for scalability, there are things that may need to change on the code and you have to be careful with that.

I think it is pretty complete, but due to the technology, it has its limitations and in our use case, we have had a few problems with it. Again, it is related to the technology.

I would rate this product an eight out of ten.

I used the solution in my company for a website, and it helped in shortening the URLs. The tool was just for the website's use case.

The solution's most valuable feature is its simplicity. The tool is already hosted in our company's environment, so I can use it right away. I don't have to think about hosting it or any other stuff related to interacting with my database. It is very smooth and quick.

I am not sure, but I think recently, the tool removed the free version. Right now, we will have to pay to use the services. A free-tier version would help people understand what PlanetScale  is all about.

I have been using PlanetScale  for a couple of months. I am just a user of the tool.

I did not face any downtime when using the product. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I cannot comment on the tool's scalability because the project we built was relatively small, and we didn't need a scalable database. I don't know how it can scale up.

Our company is pretty small. I have only about twelve to fifteen users of the tool in my company.

There was no reason to contact the support.

I have not used any tool besides PlanetScale, which I came across while browsing the internet, so I tried it, and it worked out well.

The product's initial setup phase is pretty easy. The tool guides you through setting it up and importing your application so you can start using it right away.

I don't remember if the paid version is something expensive or cheap. It has been quite a while. Last time, when I wanted to use the tool in a project, I could see it was only paid, so I didn't use the service.

I have not used any of the branching features in the tool.

If you have basic knowledge of SQL, you can use it right away. I don't think you'll need any hands-on experience.

I didn't face any challenges while integrating it with our company's existing system.

I recommend the tool to others.

I would tell others how easy it is to use and how it would reduce the burden on the application and probably let you start development immediately.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

I used PlanetScale  for my final-year university project, where I built a social media bot. I needed to persist data, so I was looking for database providers. I found good things about PlanetScale  on YouTube, which piqued my interest, so I decided to use it.

I like the solution's developer experience. When you deploy changes to the database in the portal, you can use different deployment strategies and see how things work. You can put changes into different branches, like deployment and staging. This is built into the product, allowing you to navigate changes through different branches.

It's a tool that requires some development experience. I used it with JavaScript, which has a nice hook-in. It's fairly easy if you're a well-versed developer, but it can be complicated to navigate if you're not experienced in development.

I used PlanetScale for hobby projects, so my perspective differs from someone using it commercially. Unfortunately, they've removed the free tier in recent months and pivoted to a business-to-business model. This is sad for hobby developers like me because it's a great product, but I understand they have costs to cover.

Their lowest plan now is around $40, which makes it exclusively for commercial customers. In an ideal world, they'd bring back cheaper plans. I'm not sure if they'll be able to offer a more affordable option, but it would be great if they could.

As for whether it's worth the money, that's something I'm questioning myself. Unless you have a product that will use the resources they provide in their plans, it might not be worth it. There are other solutions available. Even though PlanetScale has a great developer experience and a cheaper product, you could potentially invest that money in individuals to manage the database for you instead.

I have been using the product for five months.

Regarding stability, I never encountered any issues or bugs with PlanetScale itself. Any problems were due to mistakes on my end. I appreciate that PlanetScale uses an industry-grade solution behind the scenes. I rate it a ten out of ten.

PlanetScale's underlying infrastructure is one of its greatest strengths. From what I've seen in videos and explanations, PlanetScale can scale up to meet any business needs without issues.

I haven't personally tested its full scalability limits since I used it for a smaller project. However, based on what I've heard from others, it seems pretty much perfect. I'd give it a ten out of ten for scalability.

I found integrating PlanetScale to be pretty straightforward. The initial setup steps were really clear. I used PlanetScale and Prisma to send queries to PlanetScale and get data back. It was easy to connect Prisma with PlanetScale using their documentation.

I recommend the solution to commercial customers. Others can use cheaper alternatives. I rate it a seven out of ten.