PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases

Either way I don't care what you remember or think.

You stated you don't care what I think. Just wanted to say though that i've admired you and your company for a long time. I participated in user interviews so I could score one of your famous hats. I submitted copious feedback. I was an evangelist for branching workflows and recommended several colleagues to your product. I watched all the talks, interviews and devrel videos.

I'm glad you are doing better now as a company, but as naive as it may be, I guess I would love to see an example of a company that consistently put people over profits, that is all

it does feel to me that one way to demonstrate that is to not get pissy on hackernews. i know you’re in founder mode or whatever but this comment is the thing i’m now going to remember you for

Well I will remember this. It reflects poorly that your responses are childish when grappling with light criticism. Is this “Founder Mode”?

Now, of course, the scale of the profit is worth discussing. The use of the profit is worth discussing. But in general terms some profit is necessary.

For example, I bootstraped a business from 0 to 50 people. We took no outside investment. We "paid" for the growth using profits. Our working capital, cash reserves, stock, equipment, vehicles etc, all come out of profits.

Yes, over the years, there have been things that didn't work out. People who ended up surplus to requirements. People not suited to the role they were in. Most left amicably. Some were pushed. None of that was easy but it was necessary because just keeping unproductive (or worse, divisive) people around is bad for everyone.

Running a business is hard. Firing people is hard. Comments like "people over profits" are flippant, but miss the underlying realities small businesses face all the time.

Yes, there are large tech businesses out there with bottomless pockets, who hire (and fire) by the thousands. But surely those bring hired in cohorts that big understand that a wind blows both ways.

It's not necessarily helpful though to apply your feelings about that to all the businesses that are not that.

If you took your time to write it, you do care or if you genuinely don't, then people would now take it as a challenge to make you care...

This is just not good light. not all attention is created equal. This will hurt your company and your image.

Please, try to apologize to them if possible

I thought about it as an exercise as to what I thought your should last comment should be, it took some time but here it is

Hey, its great that you remember, it means that you cared about planetscale and somehow we were forced between false growth and real harsh truth and we wanted to present the truth, sorry if it had impacted any of your services. I know maybe I can't do much about how you can feel now about me or the company but I genuinely hope no matter what solution you might use now, you succeed in it with great success .If you feel like it, maybe give us another try but hey no pressure and as always, have a nice day :)

This took some time personally, especially after the part I genuinely hope no matter what solution personally but it didn't take more than 5 minutes to draft the whole response really.

Being kind helps. Atleast that's my philosphy or I would like to present it as such, I feel as if we are more common than different and basic human kindness resonates with that.

I hope you become the company seeking people's satisfaction first and absolute profits later but maybe that's an ideal. Just be honest with a bit of kindness and humility as there would be grace in it.

Honestly, my suggestion is to create something similar to fly.io really, have a 5$ free credit system but which requires credit card when signing up. It should prevent you from spams and if need be, try to limit it and try to do some excessive bot clearing

Maybe if you feel like you can have 5000$ for free without much compensation, then have limited (maybe verified?) people join in it for free with just credit card

Have some good restrictions on free license really, and although I haven't used fly.io as even the credit card got way too much of a requirement for me personally but,I would still look into what/how they are doing/implementing it

Taking some VPN as cautions plus taking note of suspicious activities from IP etc. comes to my mind as well if you go through this route. I think that you can genuinely create a good way to move some people as well or keep a free service while restricting it heavily really

Personally I wouldn't be able to afford the 5$ thing as well for just starting it out, I mean I haven't paid for any subscription ever on internet.

I am not sure what you are going to do or how you are going to pan out and take my suggestions lightly if need be, but please improve the tones and genuinely apologize to them if possible.

I don't know much about founder mode as other commentors point it out. I just think that your comment was a little bit rude and there were ways to make it better really

Pray tell, why did the company adopt the "fake growth" strategy in the first place?

> Either way I don't care what you remember or think.

It's evident you do. Feeling upset is fine, but writing that down as an attempt at a mic-drop statement just makes you appear incredibly thin-skinned.

Rug-pulls. Not even once.

How do you actually sell stuff on the internet with a price?

I will admit, free stuff are easy to sell... because they are free. But once you remove the free stuff, it becomes a scar easy to tell in the future, is the answer always having the paid stuff or somehow limiting who gets the free stuff.

Like as I wrote in another comment, I like fly.io's free model of some credits per month with credit card, I mean, I don't like them taking credit card but if that's what prevents them from spam, I would still consider it decent enough

But I have read some places where saying things like asking for a credit card would drive away most users, and even asking for mail for sign up sometimes really

As such the world has transitioned into something which runs via the ad model as people in some HN thread long ago basically summed it upto, it was evolution of sorts

Yet, I am on HackerNews, I care about privacy. I would feel the largest double-speak if my software got ads, at that point, I would just release it for free but that would make me no money, maybe even cost me some money, making it unsustaianable

I am not sure about the reality of things but I am a pretty frugal guy, so naturally its really hard for me to expect people to buy stuff, let alone the stuff I make/hack.

I could try to open source any stuff I build, but at that point, what is the matter of that aside from getting some stars/internet points, don't get me wrong I love the philosophy of open source yet I feel like its very hard for me to actually generate money out of it

I love building simple things I guess, My projects ideally would be a simple golang binary maybe with postgres but sqlite's cool too, and I don't want to make it too hard to install unintentionally to trap people to my cloud or whatever really

I am asking because I feel like I can't go from 0 to 0 (employing even myself) and I feel like playing the growth game could be good but sooner or later, I would find myself in the same position as planetscale in that sense and I don't want it really, and I personally feel like my work can survive without VC funding as well. SO I genuinely don't know how I will get money from projects

My projects are niche as well, most of them aren't for profitability but rather to learn. I personally feel like I might be a good guy to do a job and to do these things as random projects to increase my portfolio and if luck strikes then that could be good I suppose.

I don't even expect someone to donate to my github if I ever create a project. Low confidence maybe, I am not sure. I have seen so many cool github projects that have gotten stars but not donations. I would love to donate to them, but personally I am frugal, I don't want it as a shield but I am opening up that shield and wanting to donate to open source. In fact if I make money through such any projects, I will try to actually donate to open source in the process as well.

So my question to you is: How? You guys make it feel so simple having people pay , There was the 4 hour work week which sort of suggested-ish building plugins for things etc. and I did calculation for it to actually make me "free" and I don't know but having 1000 people buy even 5$ personally a month would feel huge. but I am not sure as my frugality makes me believe everyone is like me and so why would they give me 5$ when they could do what I did or use some open source software with just some differences really.

Key word here is "liked". Seems like OP liked the company when it had a free tier, and no longer does after it axed the tier. They don't owe your company anything, in the same way your company doesn't owe anything to the non-paying "customers" it stopped subsidising. No foul play by either party. I wouldn't take it too personally.

Imagine building a product for developers and then going on Hacker News telling people to fuck off.

Someone at my job mentioned using PlanetScale recently. I said "I'll check it out" and now I have: the CEO has terrible judgement and is a jerk. Permanent veto.

People who haven't tried doing what, running a VC-backed SaaS, a model which by its own nature is destined to end up engaging in dumping practices to gain market share, after which enshittification ensues? With the alternative being going bust or being acquired and then quickly shut down? As we've seen hundreds of times now?

I mean, yeah. In the sense that people who haven't tried kicking their cat tend to be the ones taking shots at those who have.

Look, maybe you're a unicorn, in the sense that you're the 1%, the single person in your batch who ends up both profitable and won't follow down this path. But that's an extraordinary claim that would require overwhelming evidence. You spent lots of resources on Youtube and Twitter evangelism to cheap solo devs, targeting the exact content those consume - even compared to all of your competitors and other dev tools going at this market, investing in this strategy harder than almost anyone - which obviously results in an enormously lopsided % of free-tier uses (that's the whole point of the strategy). To then go "turns out we're not profitable this way, who woulda thought, guess we have to go paid-only!", this alone basically rules out the extraordinary claim. There's no chance you didn't do the back-of-the-envelope calculation about how big of a free tier you could realistically support.

If you were a gardener would you also find it hard to make people pay for you going to their house and taking care of their garden? They're paying for it because they feel it's worth it.

Of course, it depends on what you're selling, but I'm assuming you're not asking about selling gambling products or crack cocaine. As for those, the answer is "be a psychopath".

Doesn't matter how hard you guys worked to be profitable, it's about building trust and relationship with your audience.

I am not a customer and not in the market to be a customer anytime soon, I have no horse in this race, just an observation.

Would you respect a leader who refuses to make hard calls and sinks everyone aboard the ship as a result?

Also people buy databases to do serious stuff. They pay you money to trust you with their data. Being a serious company that makes the hard calls to protect your product is exactly what a serious customer needs.

FWIW I was part of these layoffs and I completely supported them. No glory in putting your head in the sand when people count on you to do the right thing.