PlanetScale decided to remove its free tier. Many developers even call it a "rug pull." As you can imagine, many developers with hobby projects on their free tier are furious.

You can check out their statement here.

Rather than getting into the battle of what I think about the whole situation, I wanted to create a list of alternatives so if you are trying something out or want to migrate you have some cheap/free options:

Supabase - PostgreSQL

Fantastic free tier!

While you can use Supabase just for the PostgreSQL database, it offers much more. Supabase calls itself an "open-source alternative to Firebase".

It provides devs with a suite of tools, the core offering being a PostgreSQL database, authentication, real-time subscriptions, and storage. Its free tier offers a generous amount of database usage, making it an excellent choice for developers building all sorts of applications.

Neon - PostgreSQL

Fantastic free tier!

If you got used to branching on PlanetScale, Neon has you covered!
Neon is a fully managed serverless platform with a free tier. By separating storage from computing, Neon introduces autoscaling, branching, and essentially unlimited storage, addressing key challenges in modern application development.

Designed for efficiency and scalability it'll be hard to go wrong with Neon!

Turso - SQLite

Fantastic free tier!

Turso's free tier offers 9 gigabytes of storage! But it excels in another area. The simplicity of SQLite with the flexibility to deploy anywhere in the world, including within your infrastructure.

Its real appeal is its edge deployments - this unique approach ensures ultra-low latency, potentially down to microseconds, which is ideal for applications requiring immediate data access regardless of location (especially if your app is deployed in edge locations).

Edit: The founder of Turso (Glauber Costa reached out on X to give a discount code for PlanetScale users:

"Would appreciate it if you could add the special promotion for planetscale users on the post: http://turso.tech/turso-forever"

CockroachDB - SQL

Fantastic free tier!

Free for use up to 10 GiB of storage and 50M read units per month. Which should be more than enough for most hobby projects. CockroachDB offers a distributed SQL database solution that emphasizes reliability and scalability for modern applications.

AWS RDS - Multiple options

Has 750 hours and 20gb storage on the free tier

AWS offers 750 hours of Amazon RDS and 20 gigabytes of storage on its free tier (Single-AZ db.t2.micro, db.t3.micro, and db.t4g.micro Instances usage running MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL). However, AWS also gives founders a lot of credits, so if you plan on scaling but are tight on a budget, AWS can be very founder-friendly.

What other options are you considering instead of PlanetScale?

Let me know in the comments below. 💬

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