Fairly or not, when I see PlanetScale, that’s what I think of.
Seeing the CEO on here defending it as if they nailed the execution of it doesn’t help either.
Though, I wonder with any cloud provider of databases: why?
You’re basically giving your data to a 3rd-party to have access to and to be reliant on.
You have a backup of your source, but I bet many don’t have local non-cloud backups of their databases, maybe because it’s too much data to do easily, and everyone assumes the provider’s backups will suffice. This is a main reason I think that more recognized cloud brands like AWS and Azure are used.
I also had a couple of projects on their hobby plan and the pain of that rug pull made me swear I'd never use them again, no matter the size or context. I would have happily paid like $15 at the time too, but all they offered was a move to their $40+ pm plan. Insane and a terrible way to treat your users.
Irony is, I loved the brand and would have advocated hard for them otherwise.
At the time, their messaging was all about how, "we are for the enterprise and larger customers, not these piddling little poor plebs".
Well I guess they've belatedly realised that plebs turn into managers and future enterprise customers.
They got rid of Aaron Francis too who I thought did excellent work for them.
Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
it does feel to me that one way to demonstrate that is to not get pissy on hackernews. i know you’re in founder mode or whatever but this comment is the thing i’m now going to remember you for
You stated you don't care what I think. Just wanted to say though that i've admired you and your company for a long time. I participated in user interviews so I could score one of your famous hats. I submitted copious feedback. I was an evangelist for branching workflows and recommended several colleagues to your product. I watched all the talks, interviews and devrel videos.
I'm glad you are doing better now as a company, but as naive as it may be, I guess I would love to see an example of a company that consistently put people over profits, that is all
Well I will remember this. It reflects poorly that your responses are childish when grappling with light criticism. Is this “Founder Mode”?
Imagine building a product for developers and then going on Hacker News telling people to fuck off.
Someone at my job mentioned using PlanetScale recently. I said "I'll check it out" and now I have: the CEO has terrible judgement and is a jerk. Permanent veto.
Pray tell, why did the company adopt the "fake growth" strategy in the first place?
> Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
It's evident you do. Feeling upset is fine, but writing that down as an attempt at a mic-drop statement just makes you appear incredibly thin-skinned.
Rug-pulls. Not even once.
I am not a customer and not in the market to be a customer anytime soon, I have no horse in this race, just an observation.
If you took your time to write it, you do care or if you genuinely don't, then people would now take it as a challenge to make you care...
This is just not good light. not all attention is created equal. This will hurt your company and your image.
Please, try to apologize to them if possible
I thought about it as an exercise as to what I thought your should last comment should be, it took some time but here it is
Hey, its great that you remember, it means that you cared about planetscale and somehow we were forced between false growth and real harsh truth and we wanted to present the truth, sorry if it had impacted any of your services. I know maybe I can't do much about how you can feel now about me or the company but I genuinely hope no matter what solution you might use now, you succeed in it with great success .If you feel like it, maybe give us another try but hey no pressure and as always, have a nice day :)
This took some time personally, especially after the part I genuinely hope no matter what solution personally but it didn't take more than 5 minutes to draft the whole response really.
Being kind helps. Atleast that's my philosphy or I would like to present it as such, I feel as if we are more common than different and basic human kindness resonates with that.
I hope you become the company seeking people's satisfaction first and absolute profits later but maybe that's an ideal. Just be honest with a bit of kindness and humility as there would be grace in it.
Honestly, my suggestion is to create something similar to fly.io really, have a 5$ free credit system but which requires credit card when signing up. It should prevent you from spams and if need be, try to limit it and try to do some excessive bot clearing
Maybe if you feel like you can have 5000$ for free without much compensation, then have limited (maybe verified?) people join in it for free with just credit card
Have some good restrictions on free license really, and although I haven't used fly.io as even the credit card got way too much of a requirement for me personally but,I would still look into what/how they are doing/implementing it
Taking some VPN as cautions plus taking note of suspicious activities from IP etc. comes to my mind as well if you go through this route. I think that you can genuinely create a good way to move some people as well or keep a free service while restricting it heavily really
Personally I wouldn't be able to afford the 5$ thing as well for just starting it out, I mean I haven't paid for any subscription ever on internet.
I am not sure what you are going to do or how you are going to pan out and take my suggestions lightly if need be, but please improve the tones and genuinely apologize to them if possible.
I don't know much about founder mode as other commentors point it out. I just think that your comment was a little bit rude and there were ways to make it better really
The second time, I pushed strongly and made sure the entire executive team knew that we would be misleading our users. I pointed to the horizon and talked about the problems with "forever" language. I had to push very strongly back on the marketing team to change verbiage and then they silently made updates anyway to add "forever" verbiage. They were eventually fired for this.
But what I find concerning here isn't that the "free" tier went away (it almost always must) but that there's denial and push-back in this set of threads about the verbiage. You made a mistake. Own it and apologize for the verbiage you put out there. Don't deny that it was ever there or argue over pedantic details about where/how that verbiage was placed.
I think the longevity of Gmail, Youtube etc being both (a) absolutely free and (b) personally critical to many people has rather warped expectations in this regard. Take the freebie, be grateful, but don't imagine that giving no money to a corporation is going to incur any obligation from them to you.
I do think it was a little bad move because now you can't even test planetscale and the memories of its free stuff still might haunt some people
I didn't enjoy doing it. I felt bad but I don't regret it at all.
He posted this:
"I would like to thank the haters for helping me promote the new PlanetScale $5 plan all day. Thanks guys."
Scorching his reputation on Hacker News is a real 400 IQ movie for a cloud database company CEO.
I never disagreed with the decision to lay people off to become profitable. That's part of the implicit agreement when you take employment in the US. You can quit whenever you want and they can fire you whenever they want! I knew that going in!
I agreed with it, but of course it stung. That's only natural!
Sam and I are all good though! To his immense credit he reached out to me directly a little while back to mend any hurt feelings, of which I had a few. We're friends. He even came on my podcast and we talked for over an hour like old buds.
I have a lot of feelings and sometimes they get hurt. Sam has a fiduciary responsibility to the company. Today PlanetScale is a going concern and I'm happy and doing great! All is well.
The podcast is good btw, y'all should listen!
PlanetScale Postgres with CEO Sam Lambert https://youtu.be/IB3mzON8Iyw
Looking at their youtube channel, Aaron's videos had a total of ~1.4m views over 24 videos (an average of ~58k per video). Their recent videos don't even get past 1k views...
My interest in it peaked when I heard about NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe/TCP) and SPDK from Xata[1] and apparently with that performance is as good as planetscale metal, but planetscale found their methodology flawed[2] and they Xata never responded.
[1] https://xata.io/blog/reaction-to-the-planetscale-postgresql-...
Just asking since I find it both the planetscale's engineering and its impact on competitive landscape very interesting.
Aiven (not working for them, just a happy client) started offering local nvme disks for their postgres service in 2017. (https://aiven.io/blog/larger-and-faster-aiven-postgresql-pla...)
Back then I was sure it was only a matter of time for other hosted database providers to move on from EBS. But until Planetscale made a lot of noise about Metal no one seemed to bother.
Be wary of building a cheap hobby project on it expecting pricing to stay consistent. If $40+ isn't feasible for you, you may be trying to switch off to a hosted PostgreSQL option, with all the pain MySQL->Postgres entails, soon.
Also what was capitalism again?
This post is the first time I've heard of your company and your blog post interested me.
When proprietors go to the mat in the comment section, I immediately lose any interest in patronizing them.
far better to just have transparent pricing that takes customer needs into account. bravo planetscale
[1] https://neon.com
Even when a database scales to zero someone still has to pay.
It sure does scale to zero alright...
After they ditched there free tier, it became basically untenable to justify trying Planetscale for $30 (USD as well) on a POC or MVP product, and it also felt like you were paying a lot for unneeded hardware.
In a less anti-competitive world you would be perfectly happy to use a database hosted in an Equinix facility or whatever next door. You could connect via a fractional 100Gbps link at a price multiple orders of magnitude below what Azure would actually charge for an equivalent amount of data transfer.
I also imagine the previous Hobby plan running on Vitess is actually more expensive to run than even this $5 dollar tier, not viable unless it is on Postgres Metal with no HA.
I also wish there is a list of non hyperscaler providers with regions that are close to planetscale offering. Last time I checked Hetzner dont come anywhere close enough to be used for compute.
So yeah, in the end available as much as possible (while sounding like "I needed it yesterday") might be the way to go even if you're not actually aiming for the extreme end of uptime.
and Sam's response
"we've seen a number of Supabase -> PlanetScale migrations and it's been pretty simple with significant cost savings for the customer. The scale part of this is hard to answer because it really depends on the workload"
Looks like this is a perfect answer to my question, I mean I get it guys, I have created a comment here too on why their free tier thing deletion thing was wrong but I also get it, I personally knew a girl on discord who would create 20 free instances of some coding free thing just because she can and I honestly felt that moment that this is the reason why people like me who just use stuff casually don't have it for free.
Anyways, Oh god I was this close to writing it but then I saw the outlore's comments lore and how sam said "Either way I don't care what you remember or think", I am typing it in the moment but Sam you had no reason to type it smh
Most people are trying to help you, maybe the scars are still recent when the free tier was lost but there are better ways of explaining that the scar was both side, that you were hurt too and are willing to explain to them in a kind manner.
I was this close for advocating for PlanetScale, nope, Supabase/Neon, atleast they are open source but personally I just feel like hosting a hetzner instance and self hosting postgres but the only thing I am scared is that I am gonna mess things up and somehow would one day come to a broken system without backups. Any good utility or anything that makes backup as secure as one feels in the cloud regarding backups?
Last year they increase the pricing again.
they attract users and increase the pricing. that is the game here.
