Exploring Enterprise - the sales process

March 22, 2024

PlanetScale sales process

In an effort to make the process as smooth and quick as possible for you, we've outlined what the typical sales process looks like so you know what to expect and can prepare accordingly.

This is the general process we aim for, but there may be some additional back and forth in between depending on your current setup. We are always happy to schedule additional calls or check-ins at any point in the process.

1. Reach out to us: First, fill out our contact form to let us know what type of plan you're looking for. In most cases, filling out the technical questionnaire and running the pre-checks script during this step will help speed up the process, especially if you're looking for pricing. However, it is not mandatory.
2. Gathering information: We respond via email to ask for some additional information about your workload and application requirements. We may ask you to fill out our technical questionnaire and run our pre-checks script. We sometimes will also request slow query log results. This gives us important information about your current workload so that we can begin to prepare pricing information and other answers specific to your application.
3. Call with our Solutions team: If our solutions engineering team determines that an Enterprise plan is the best fit for your use-case, we reach out to schedule a call with your team. During this call, we discuss timelines, possible configurations, add-on options (Support, sharding, BAAs, etc.), and more. Gathering this information allows us to put together a pricing proposal. This is also your opportunity to ask us any questions about the platform. We are happy to do a short demo here as well or schedule a follow up demo if there are specific features you're interested in.
4. Pricing proposal: In some cases, we are able to gather sufficient information to prepare a pricing proposal after the first call. The pricing proposal is created based on what we learned in the intro call, your pre-checks script results, and the technical questionnaire answers. We can also include a proof-of-concept commitment with an opt-out period. Once the pricing is prepared, we send it to you and can schedule a call for further discussion if desired.
5. Optionally, gather more information: Our aim is to get you pricing information as quickly as possible, but in some more complex situations, we need additional information to get a proposal put together. Our pricing is based on a number of factors, primarily: memory, compute, storage, replicas, sharding, and support packages. If you have several databases or environments to move over, or have some other complex situation, usually the fastest way to get to pricing is to share your itemized bill from your current database provider.
6. Conversations with stakeholders: At this point, your security team or other stakeholders may have additional questions about the platform. We are happy to fill out any questionnaires you may have or get on a call with them. We can also provide additional material and documentation for anyone needing extra convincing.
7. Proof of concept: If you have chosen to proceed with the proof of concept, we will create a shared Slack channel and work together to spin up, optimize, and benchmark your chosen test workload based on the success criteria we set together. The PoC phase typically lasts 30 to 90 days and includes an opt-out period. In most cases, the PoC fulfills the success criteria much earlier than that, and companies choose to move forward ahead of schedule. In these cases, we roll the PoC straight into the migration for the full workload.

Technical questionnaire

The PlanetScale Technical questionnaire is a short form that asks questions about your production workload, such as:

• Architecture information for your database clusters — Total number of databases, instance sizes/types, disk/IOPs allocations, regions, application stack, and tooling.
• Performance profile — Observed traffic patterns, peak QPS, average QPS, observed resource utilization.
• Team and project — Desired outcome, timeline, security and compliance.
• Pre-checks script results — See below.

PlanetScale pre-checks

To help us get a better sense of your production workload, please run the PlanetScale pre-checks script against your current database and send back the tarball generated by the script. You can either upload it at the end of the technical questionnaire or email it to your Solutions rep.

The ps-prechecks script summarizes the status and configuration of your MySQL database server. It works by connecting to a MySQL database server and querying it for status and configuration information. It saves this information into files in a temporary directory with clean formatting.

It is not a tuning tool or diagnosis tool. It produces a report that is easy to diff and can be pasted into emails without losing the formatting. It should work well on any modern UNIX systems. The ps-prechecks script is a heavily modified version of pt-mysql-summary, which is part of the Percona Toolkit.

ps-prechecks is designed to connect to your live database environment, execute queries to collect the relevant information, and process/summarize the data without further impacting your database environment. While this script is well tested, any database tool can pose a risk to your database environment.

Usage

Before using this tool, please:

• Read the documentation in the repo README
• Test the script on a non-production server first
• Back up your production server and verify the backups

To use, simply execute it. Optionally add a double dash and then the same command-line options you would use to connect to MySQL, such as the following:

ps-prechecks --user=root

You can find additional options in the repo README.

Need help?

Get help from the PlanetScale Support team, or join our GitHub discussion board to see how others are using PlanetScale.