PlanetScale vs Upstash
Pricing
PlanetScale: Postgres from $5/mo, Vitess (MySQL) from $39/mo, no free tier
Upstash: Free tier, usage-based from $0.20/100K commands
Description
PlanetScale: Managed Postgres and Vitess (MySQL) databases with git-like branching for safe schema changes
Upstash: Serverless Redis and Kafka: pay per request, scale to zero when idle
Pros
- 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
- Free tier includes 10,000 commands/day, plenty for caching and rate limiting
- True pay-per-use pricing means zero cost when your app has no traffic
- Works at the edge: pairs perfectly with Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, and Netlify
Cons
- 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
- Not a full Redis replacement: some commands and data types are missing
- Latency is higher than self-hosted Redis for latency-critical workloads
- Costs can sneak up on you if you have high-frequency operations
Details
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.
Upstash is Redis for the serverless world. Instead of paying $15-30/month for an always-on Redis instance, you pay per command, and when your app is idle, you pay nothing. This makes it perfect for caching, rate limiting, and session storage in serverless apps.
The free tier gives you 10,000 commands per day, which covers basic caching for most early-stage apps. The killer use case is pairing it with edge functions on Vercel or Cloudflare: Upstash has a global low-latency network designed for this. If you need full Redis compatibility or sub-millisecond latency, self-hosted Redis is still better. For everything else, Upstash saves you money and ops work.
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