CockroachDB vs PlanetScale
Pricing
CockroachDB: 30-day trial with $400 credit, then from $0.092 per vCPU-hour
PlanetScale: Postgres from $5/mo, Vitess (MySQL) from $39/mo, no free tier
Description
CockroachDB: Distributed SQL database that survives outages, Postgres-compatible, with usage-based cloud pricing
PlanetScale: Managed Postgres and Vitess (MySQL) databases with git-like branching for safe schema changes
Pros
- Postgres-compatible wire protocol: use your existing Postgres drivers and ORMs
- New cloud organizations get a 30-day trial with $400 of credit, no credit card needed for Standard
- Multi-region by design: your data survives zone and region failures automatically
- Database branching lets you test schema changes without touching production
- Non-blocking schema migrations on Vitess: no downtime during changes
- Postgres starts at $5/mo for a single node, or $15/mo with high availability
Cons
- No free tier for new customers: after the trial, Standard costs about $203/mo for 2 vCPUs and 100 GB
- Higher query latency than single-region Postgres (consensus overhead on every write)
- Overkill for most solo founder projects: distributed consistency adds complexity you rarely need
- Some Postgres features are missing or behave differently (limited extensions, partial full-text search functions)
- No free tier, and Vitess (MySQL) databases start at $39/mo
- The $5 Postgres node is tiny (1/16 vCPU, 512 MiB of memory), so production apps usually need more
- Foreign keys on Vitess must be turned on per database and work only on unsharded databases
Details
CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database that speaks the Postgres wire protocol. Your existing Postgres drivers, ORMs, and queries work without changes. The key selling point is resilience: data is automatically replicated across nodes, so a zone going down does not take your database offline.
Cloud pricing for new deployments from 15 September 2026 is pay-as-you-go. Every new organization gets a 30-day trial with $400 of credit. After that, clusters pause until you add a payment method and are deleted after a 30-day grace period. The Standard edition costs $0.092 per vCPU-hour, about $203 a month for 2 vCPUs and 100 GB, and Mission Critical costs $0.162 per vCPU-hour. Existing customers stay on their current plans. For most solo founders this is more database than you need, both in cost and in write latency. For simpler use cases, Neon or Supabase give you standard Postgres with free tiers.
PlanetScale brings git workflows to your database. Create a branch, change your schema, test it, then merge it into production with zero downtime. No more scary migration scripts run against your live database at 2 AM.
The big hit was losing the free tier in 2024, which pushed many indie developers to alternatives like Neon and Supabase. PlanetScale now sells managed Postgres as well as Vitess, its MySQL-compatible option built on the technology that powers YouTube. A single-node Postgres database starts at $5 a month and a three-node high-availability cluster at $15, while Vitess starts at $39. That brings a small database within reach of side projects, but Neon (Postgres, free tier) and Supabase (Postgres plus extras, free tier) are still the cheaper places to start.
Verified
