Farewell, PlanetScale free tier
Posted on 07 March, 2024
Unfortunate news from PlanetScale that they are retiring their free tier, effective from 6th April this year.
Not news that I wanted — the LSERSA booking system currently uses PlanetScale — but made worse by:
- tone of the message ("PlanetScale forever") which reads like a missive to their investors, not users
- I think that they've used the opportunity to increase prices (my recollection is that the paid plans started at $29, but pricing now is from $39)
- I'm not at all sure that they've actually informed users of the change; certainly I've seen nothing yet at the LSERSA email address that is registered for that account
Assuming we wanted to keep the same region, changing to a PlanetScale paid plan would actually cost $44/month; a quick peruse of AWS suggests that a single database instance there would probably cost between $15-20/month.
The only 'free tier' option that I'm prepared to think about is Supabase which I'm probably going to implement. Their free tier is more than adequate for out current use, and (at the moment anyway) their paid plans start from $25 so would be more palatable if they follow suit at some point.
I feel like I need to explain (defend?!) the point on there being no other, good, free tiers. There are free-to-use databases that I trust - MongoDB Atlas for one, and (albeit I’ve never used it) I assume Firebase can be relied on.
However, my specific criteria are:
- Because there’s payment information involved, I want an automated backup. The Atlas free tier doesn’t do that, and I doubt Firebase does
- More important - SQL-based. I use NoSQL (MongoDB in fact) elsewhere, but this system was written using SQL; utterly suits tables; and whilst I need to make some changes to use a different library, I’m not going to re-architect it entirely to suit a NoSQL implementation
So: Supabase!
UPDATE: Turns out that PlanetScale have been emailing for the last month, requesting that a credit card is added to the account to "verify the organisation" and "stop abuse of [their] free tier". Since I haven't responded, there's actually an earlier deadline of 20th March at which point the database will be slept. 13 days to find another provider, which means really I need to switch it in the downtime between bookings closing on Thursday 14th and the next session being made available on Sunday 17th ...
I'll add another post once I've made the switch ...
