Deprecating the Scaler plan

By Nick Van Wiggeren | February 5, 2024

Last year, PlanetScale launched the next evolution of our pricing: Scaler Pro. Fast forward to today, our customers have spoken with their data — it’s now our fastest-growing product. Time and time again, we’ve heard that straightforward resource-based pricing just works. It leads to simpler system design and more predictable billing.

Today, we’re giving notice that we are discontinuing our serverless Scaler plan. Scaler will be removed as a product option on February 12th and existing Scaler customers will have 2 months to move to Scaler Pro. This decision is based on thousands of customers’ feedback and a belief that everyone deserves predictable pricing for their database. Everything we said in our Scaler Pro announcement post seven months ago is even more true today.

PlanetScale for serverless

This does not mean we’re not the home of the best database for serverless — it’s the opposite. Our architecture was built from the ground up to scale in all the dimensions important for infinitely scalable edge applications. We can handle millions of connections, distribute data around the globe, and soon, we will be able to automatically route incoming connections to the closest region with our intelligent edge.

Serverless has tenets like "scale to zero" and optimizes for periods of no use. PlanetScale powers websites and applications that need to be on 24/7/365 around the globe, and turning a database off is the last thing that we optimize for. Instead, we focus on horizontal scaling via sharding, change management, and smooth no-downtime upgrades to help databases with real-world usage.

Most importantly, PlanetScale scales. We are the primary database for companies totaling well over $40B in market cap, with individual clusters containing 1000s of nodes and 100s of terabytes of data. We’ve proven that from our smallest PS-10 to our largest enterprise databases, we’re built for the future of software.

Putting the "server" in "serverless"

Looking at the industry, we’ve all collectively learned a lot in the last few years.

We’ve always known that the phrase "serverless" is an oxymoron. Every request and every query from a serverless product is run on a computer somewhere, and the limitless scale and novel pricing methods may provide alternate units and easier orchestration, but we’re still using servers.

The more we’ve seen PlanetScale adopted, the more we are convinced that serverless as a deployment method is extremely useful — it encourages scaling in stateless applications and allows customers to get started faster. It also puts immense strain on legacy databases. The storm of 10,000 connections after being on the front page of Reddit is the opposite of what the creators of PostgreSQL imagined was possible 25 years ago.

That’s why we’ve continued to make sure that we’re the best place to put state for serverless applications — from effortlessly pushing the limits with one million concurrent connections to putting our database connections on the edge with HTTP/3 — we care deeply about giving developers at every stage access to the best database from wherever they deploy their applications.

It’s also why we’re removing serverless pricing and focusing on building the bedrock of the modern database to power the internet. We don’t want to hide the fact that we’re running on servers — we’re proud of it!

Simply put, being the best database for serverless workloads does not require being serverless. Holding the state for massive horizontal applications is a completely different problem, and it’s one we’re laser-focused on solving.

What does this mean for you?

If you’re using a Scaler plan database today, you can seamlessly migrate it over to a Scaler Pro plan by visiting the dashboard and selecting a Scaler Pro cluster size. On Scaler Pro, you’ll get unlimited usage of the cluster size you’ve selected. And your database will be upgraded with two replicas to improve resiliency and scale out your reads.

If you’re new to selecting database cluster sizes, we’ve made it as simple as possible by displaying CPU and memory usage on the PlanetScale dashboard. We recommend sizing up when your workload consistently reaches 70% or above of the available CPU. If you need help selecting a size, our Support team is available to make recommendations.

In the coming weeks, we will email every current Scaler customer with recommendations on which Scaler Pro cluster size will work best for their workload. We’ll also include a snapshot of what their bill would look like under Scaler Pro to make sure that we’re transparent about the impact of these changes.

On April 12th, we will automatically migrate any remaining Scaler plan databases over to Scaler Pro. This will not change the amount of resources or disrupt your database in any way. It will just be a plan change that will impact your bill.

If you’re a happy PlanetScale customer and are interested in discounts, reach out to us to see what options you have. We have flexible options that can help you save on the database you know and use with a discount program that allows you to grow and scale without concerns.

Again, if you have any questions, do not hesitate to reach out to our support team or read our Scaler Pro upgrade FAQ.