How it works
PlanetScale began as a hosted version of Vitess, the system YouTube built to spread MySQL across many machines (sharding). Its signature workflow treats schema changes like code: branch the database, change the branch, open a deploy request, and PlanetScale applies the change in production without locking tables or taking the site down.
In 2025 it added PlanetScale Postgres, and it offers Neki for sharded Postgres and Metal clusters on fast local NVMe drives. It dropped its free plan in 2024 and is aimed at production workloads rather than hobby projects, although single-node Postgres databases now start at a few dollars a month.
PlanetScale pros and cons
Pros
- Proven at very large scale through Vitess
- Schema changes without downtime through branches and deploy requests
- Both MySQL and PostgreSQL, with query insights built in
Cons
- No free plan
- Highly available and sharded setups cost far more than small hosts
- More than a small project needs
When to use PlanetScale
Pick it when
- Busy production apps where downtime during migrations is not acceptable
- MySQL workloads that need to scale out across machines
Skip it when
- Hobby projects or prototypes that fit a free tier elsewhere
PlanetScale pricing
Paid
No free plan. Single-node PostgreSQL from about $5 a month, highly available Vitess (MySQL) clusters from about $39 a month, Metal from about $50 a month.
PlanetScale pricing page (opens in a new tab)Approximate, checked September 2026.What the other tools cost
PlanetScale vs the alternatives
Related terms
More in Backend platforms
Hosted databases