Why We Migrated from Neon to PlanetScale

[asib]

> 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.

[anthonyronning]

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.

[gausswho]

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.

[theamk]

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.

[mrweasel]

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?

[clarkbw]

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?

[gr4vityWall]

> 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.

[anthonyronning]

> 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.

[samlambert]

if it's going down and causing reputation damage then $1 a month is too expensive.

[markskram]

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]

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).

[vlucas]

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.

[samlambert]

I'd be happy to show you around PlanetScale if there is interest.

[jmull]

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.

[markskram]

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.

[acedTrex]

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

[beoberha]

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]

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

[bddicken]

It's real Postgres operated by PlanetScale. You get HA by default, the best performance, query insights, etc.

https://planetscale.com/blog/benchmarking-postgres

[josephd79]

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

[samlambert]

It is but we've been giving people access. If you are interested then email [e-mail]

[samlambert]

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

[markskram]

thanks for working with us, sam!

[anthonyronning]

Thank you for the great service!

[cl0ckt0wer]

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

[anthonyronning]

Pre-seed stage startup of two people. No, we can't hire a DBA.

[dizhn]

They listed some prices. It's like $150 per month.

[vmg12]

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

[anthonyronning]

We get 750 compute hours per month across our entire org, then charged 16c per hour.

[xmorse]

The answer is an open secret

[markskram]

;)

[unixhero]

I am bullish on fly.io

[xmorse]

I am not. No one ever heard of their managed postgres and they already started calling it with an acronym

[jxi]

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