[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.

[asib]

Maybe you were referring to specifics of Neon's usage-based pricing.

The bullet I quoted makes it seem like you feel punished for having to pay more because you used more resources. That's, like, the fundamental idea of usage-based pricing. If you feel punished, it seems as though you misunderstood the whole idea.

[anthonyronning]

I see. Yeah I'm not against usage-based in general. Just specific to database's, especially in my instance where it feels like I'm paying more for the luxury of having a scale-to-zero feature that I've quickly grown beyond.

I'll reiterate that it's not the only reason why I'm moving off of them. Reliability, performance, insights, etc.

It just happens to be a lot more affordable too.

[jorams]

Having plugged your numbers into the pricing for both Neon and Planetscale I'm rather confused. At Planetscale, given the numbers cited in the post, you're paying for 4 servers (+ replicas) with one eighth of a vCPU each, running 24/7. That's equivalent to about 375 Neon compute-hours per month. Your $69 Neon plan included twice that. Neon only goes down to 1/4th of a vCPU, but that does include the same amount of memory as the 1/8th at Planetscale, so take that 4 times and you have 4 databases running all month for the price of your $69 plan at Neon. How did you get to $250?

[anthonyronning]

Honestly, I don't even know. My last month bill was for 1947 compute hours for a total of $260. I just have the 4 databases. Looks like two of them are at .5 instead of .25, maybe that's it? Unless they are auto scaling me up occasionally and I'm not aware?

[bddicken]

In the database world, serverless/autoscaling pricing is almost always more expensive for real workloads. The % of workloads where it makes sense is small. Ones where 90% of the time there's little small traffic and 10% of the time the DB sees large traffic spikes. Otherwise, just pay a fixed cost for the hardware you need.

[halfmatthalfcat]

This pitfall of "serverless" has been widely known since people started abusing lambda to be "always on". Serverless is a PaaS gaslight to make you pay more for the perceived convenience.

[swiftcoder]

Serverless is often cheaper just so long as your workflows are bursty/infrequent. For example, we don't need to pay to permanently rent/colocate a beefy server, just to run a batch job once a week.

If you have a constant base load of requests, lambda is just the wrong tool for the job.

[vasco]

It's not a gaslight, but it's only cost effective for specific usage patterns. It's only a "gaslight" if you think you need to run every workload the same way and don't cost estimate before you roll it out.