PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases

Going from 3 node highly available multi region DB clusters at 30$ per month to 5$ a month for a single DB node

Most people only need a single database node and will only ever need a single database node. There are many LOB apps in the world that you could reasonably turn off from 5 pm to 9 am every day. Five 9’s is an incredibly expensive and often unnecessary feature. I think this is a great offering.

Funnily enough I've been contemplating the idea of websites open during business hours and such for "local" as in kinda national scales. But it breaks down quickly once you factor in a potentially global audience.

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.

B&h photo video closes their order system on Jewish holidays in the NYC time zone. I often find myself saving items to order the next day on there.

Government websites like that aren't crazy uncommon because the letter of the law around accessibility can be interpreted to require a real person to be available any time the website is available for certain electronic forms: https://freakonomics.com/2012/08/this-website-only-open-duri...

(people in the comments did not get the correct reason why)