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PlanetScale Pricing in 2026

Plans, hidden costs, and alternatives compared

Is PlanetScale worth the price?

6/10

PlanetScale removed its free tier in 2024, making it a harder sell for hobbyists.

But for production MySQL workloads, the managed Vitess offering with zero-downtime migrations is unmatched. Postgres support starting at $5/mo is competitive.

Pricing Plans

Free Trial

Postgres (Single Node)

$5/month

Development and low-traffic

  • PostgreSQL database
  • 10 GB storage included
  • 100 GB bandwidth included
  • Dev branches: $5/mo each
  • Autoscaling storage
Most Popular

Vitess PS-10 (Base)

$39/month

MySQL-compatible, smallest cluster

  • 1/8 vCPU, 1 GB RAM
  • 10 GB storage included
  • 100 GB bandwidth included
  • Production + dev branches
  • Online schema migrations

Vitess HA (3-zone)

$39/month starting

Primary + 2 replicas across 3 AZs

  • 99.99% SLA
  • Automatic failover
  • Zero-downtime migrations
  • Horizontal sharding available

Metal

$50/month starting

NVMe local storage

  • Unlimited IOPS
  • Ultra-low latency
  • High-performance workloads

Enterprise

Custom

Bring-your-own-cloud available

  • Single-tenant deployment
  • Technical account manager
  • PCI compliance (Managed)
  • Migration assistance
  • Custom SLA

Hidden Costs & Gotchas

No free tier — even development databases cost $5/mo minimum

HA storage costs 3x single-node ($1.50/GB vs $0.50/GB) because of replicas

Bandwidth overage at $0.06/GB can surprise high-traffic apps

New accounts are size-capped at PS-160 until you pay $100+

Read replicas and additional branches each incur cluster-equivalent costs

Which Plan Do You Need?

Teams needing zero-downtime schema migrations

MySQL-heavy production workloads

Companies scaling beyond single-node databases

Organizations requiring horizontal sharding

Our Recommendation

startup

Postgres single node at $5/mo for development. Vitess PS-10 at $39/mo for production MySQL. Budget for storage overages beyond 10 GB.

enterprise

Enterprise plan for single-tenant deployment and PCI compliance. Negotiate volume pricing for multiple databases.

freelancer

Consider Neon or Supabase for free-tier development databases. PlanetScale only makes sense for production MySQL needs.

How PlanetScale Compares to Competitors

Neon offers a free tier with 0.5 GB storage and autoscaling Postgres — much better for development. Supabase includes 500 MB free Postgres plus auth and storage.

Turso (LibSQL) offers 9 GB free. PlanetScale justifies its premium with Vitess-powered horizontal sharding and non-blocking schema changes that no competitor matches.

Alternatives to PlanetScale