PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases

If somebody built a service to try out planetscale or the fact that planetscale was constantly hyped around / sponsored some big names atleast in the youtube scale, I am pretty sure that some people went there thinking about the free forever and everything...

I do think it was a little bad move because now you can't even test planetscale and the memories of its free stuff still might haunt some people

Were we supposed to just keep it up until we go out of business or something? Out of sheer duty. Like burn everything we built to the ground to keep the free tier going as long as possible? Endlessly indentured to provide a free service on the internet for people that will never pay us money so that the people that do pay us money can eventually have to move provider too because we are shutting down?

I didn't enjoy doing it. I felt bad but I don't regret it at all.

Its hard shutting down services and nobody wants to do it. I've been there as a CTO and co-founder, but you made the right decision. Glad to see the new $5 plan because, imo, Planetscale is the best database to build with for majority of applications.

thank you

Fair take I guess, but my curiosity wants me to ask how big were the costs of the free tier that it was trying to make you shut down..

Do you feel as if people were abusing the free tier ? Was the only solution according to PlanetScale be to close the free tier entirely? How much were the people actually using the service (like out of 100 people who signed up, how many people were constantly utilizing it till its fullest) or ( maybe abusing it even)

If lets say that you could build your company once again or you could start planetscale from its beginnings, would you still take this decision before it was big, since I feel like as if the free tier was a key part in atleast giving PlanetScale some name/fame.

I can understand how you feel but I just feel like there were a lot of people who were advocates of your software, partially because of how people could test it out for free as well and those advocates were the one who were hurt the most. Personally, I wasn't involved but I would pretty bummed too if I advocate a service and it does something like this, although, I would still understand the situation.

Just apologize for misleading those who depended on your "free" promises. That's it, simple as that.

Just don't forget to add 5$ "forever"

Yes, that was the promise you made. You said 'besides our commercial offering we're going to support your personal projects you run out of passion, forever' and then you changed it to 'actually, we're going to delete your passion projects unless you pay us money'.

You should absolutely regret making that promise. As I understand it you're wrapping hardware at AWS and GCP, and likely have since the beginning, so you should absolutely have understood that this was a bad promise because it was dependent on recurring costs towards those suppliers that you did not have control over.

>I felt bad but I don't regret it at all.

Sure, it sounds like a marketing mistake, and you're owning up to it not being sustainable.

But you're burning trust with people before they even have a relationship with your company if you pretend it never happened.

It's much better to say "Sorry non-customers, this wasn't sustainable. I hope this new approach will better serve us both in the hobby use case and still be sustainable!"

i have said almost exactly this so many times since it happened

“you should absolutely have understood that this was a bad promise”

Absolutely wild to me that you talk to peers like children.

Nobody owes you anything. It’s all best effort.

It is both strange, fascinating but also wired and scary to watch all of these unfold in real life. Not just on the internet.

In pre 2010 era, we all knew Unlimited Bandwidth, Unlimited Storage was marketing and no one believes it. There is some sort of limit, and as long as we dont get caught it is fine. Free "forever" offering, Unlimited were all best effort. And It isn't just tech, but also politics. I mean they all say it but most wouldn't believe it.

And then we have a whole new generation of people who dont have this as norm anymore. They do believe everything should be free and could be free. Utopia is just around the corner. The cost of anything is so abstracted and muddled they have no idea why anything is priced as such.

Yeah, you should be very adult and say that when corporations come to you and remind you that they think you owe them something.

Maybe the weird part was our generation getting obviously lied to by marketing and being like "this is fine"?

Maybe we shouldn't have been so accepting of long lists of asterisks/footnotes in ads or ToCs that invalidate much of the promotional material?