PlanetScale Pricing in 2026
Plans, hidden costs, and alternatives compared
Is PlanetScale worth the price?
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 TrialPostgres (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
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.
