$50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

$60/TB of egress is quite a lot

I'm stoked about this release too...

From what I can tell, the 'Metal' offering runs on nodes with directly attached NVMe rather than network-attached storage. That means there isn't a per-customer IOPS cap – they actually market it as 'unlimited I/O' because you hit CPU before saturating the disk. The new $50 M-class clusters are essentially smaller versions of those nodes with adjustable CPU and RAM in AWS and GCP .

RE: EC2 shapes, it's not a shared EBS volume but a dedicated instance with local storage. BUT you'll still want to monitor capacity since the storage doesn't autoscale.

ALSO this pricing makes high-throughput Postgres accessible for indie projects, which is pretty neat.

Planetscale support has been top-notch to work with, ++. Keep up the great work y'all!

I haven't read HN for a while, this appears to just be an advertisement, did the rules change and advertisements for new products are promoted like product placement in movies?

asking for a friend that liked this space

If anyone from Planetscale is reading this, please know I hate what you did to your website. I previously had it bookmarked as an example of excellent, usable website design. About a year ago it turned into a plaintext nightmare. The first time I saw the new design I genuinely thought that a CSS file had failed to load in my browser. It's awful.

*Edit:* It also fails to load other pages if you have JavaScript or XHR disabled.

Doesnt "Metal" infer you get the whole box to yourself? Curious if my definitions are different to others here because I don't get what's "Metal" about sharing an instance with others.

You're still sharing nvme IO, cpu, memory bandwidth, etc. Not having a VM isn't really the point. (EDIT: and could have been done with non-metal aws instances with direct-attached nvme anyway)

It might be slightly off topic but I have a hard time understanding the layout of the website on mobile, it's not clear what is clickable and what's not.

Really excited for more people to get to use Metal. Let me know if you have any questions.

For the less experienced devs, how should I be thinking about choosing between this vs Amazon Aurora?

Perhaps a naive question — but why would someone use a dedicated database provider and connect from another cloud provider's application service? ...as opposed to using the same provider's db + app service offering?

Wouldn't this introduce additional latency among other issues?

Off-topic: when will postgres 18 be offered on metal?

Sounds amazing, but i would rather be able to run the database locally and use the same in dev as in production. Is this possible?

Sounds cool!

Would be curious to know what the underlying aws ec2 instance is.

Is each DB on a dedicated instance?

If not, are there per-customer iops bounds?

Will these smaller instances be offered for Vitess / MySQL compatible users?

  > $50

how does this compare to an RDS offering?

So what happens if you get a nvme failure? Is there automatic failover and restore?

How does cross data center nodes work?

$50 bucks gets you an EIGHTH of a vCPU, 1GB RAM, and 10GB SSD??? This is quite frankly highway robbery. Not to mention the laughable bandwidth. Hetzner will give you 16 vCPU, 32GB RAM, and 640GB SSD for less than that. We're talking over an order of magnitude difference in value here.

Let's gooooo! Incredible deal for indiehackers.