RDS vs PlanetScale: Pricing Considerations
Note: This blog post has been done as an independent pricing evaluation done for the benefit of Vantage users and the broader infrastructure community. While Vantage employees have met with both representatives of AWS and PlanetScale to confirm details, this is not a sponsored post and was not commissioned by either party.
PlanetScale is a recent entrant to the Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) market and is capturing significant developer mindshare. The company is taking a developer experience focused approach to creating and managing databases with what’s advertised as a “serverless” database service. Their offering is powered by an open-source software named Vitess and is priced primarily on rows read, written and storage utilized.
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a service that has been available to customers since 2009. Similar to most AWS products, Amazon has focused on providing the bare primitives while much of the work is still contingent on you to manage and maintain. Amazon RDS is one of the top cost drivers for most organizations and is currently ranked as the #2 cost driving service on the Vantage Cost Leaderboard, behind Amazon EC2.
For this comparison, we’ll match PlanetScale against the following RDS configuration - with specific instance types mention further down:
