PlanetScale Pricing in 2026: What You Actually Pay Now the Free Tier Is Gone

PlanetScale spent years as the default answer to "which database should I start on?" Then it deleted the free tier, and the answer got complicated. This is the numbers-first version: what PlanetScale actually costs in 2026, a worked monthly bill for a real small app, and the exact usage point where a cheaper database wins.

The one thing that changed: there is no free tier

PlanetScale removed its free "Hobby" database in 2024. That single decision is why half the internet's database advice from 2022 to 2023 is now wrong, and why searches like "free alternative to PlanetScale" and "RIP PlanetScale" filled up Reddit (the r/nextjs thread is a good snapshot of the exodus).

What replaced it is not a free tier. It is a $5/month floor. PlanetScale's cheapest database in 2026 is a single-node Postgres instance (pricing page, AWS us-east-1, July 2026) meant for development and prototyping. Useful, but it is a paid line item from day one, and a single node is not something you run production traffic on.

So the honest framing for 2026 is: PlanetScale is now a paid-from-day-one database that competes on performance and operational tooling, not on a generous free tier. Price it that way.

The real 2026 price ladder

Here is what you actually pay, pulled straight from the pricing page (AWS us-east-1, July 2026). Prices vary by cloud and region.

Two things worth flagging before you budget:

1. The $5 and $15 numbers are Postgres, which PlanetScale added more recently. The product most people mean when they say "PlanetScale" is the Vitess-based MySQL, and that floor is $39/month for a 3-node setup.
2. "Metal" is a different billing model. On non-metal plans you pay for the cluster and then for storage separately. On Metal, storage is included in the instance price because the disks are locally attached. That makes Metal cost more up front ($50/month entry for Postgres) but removes the separate storage meter that surprises people later.

A worked bill: small production app

Take a normal early-stage app. One primary database, some read traffic, nightly growth, and you want a replica so a single node dying does not take you down. Here is the arithmetic for the two realistic PlanetScale paths.

Path A, Postgres HA (the cheap serious option): the 3-node HA cluster starts at $15/month at the smallest instance size (512 MiB RAM). That is genuinely cheap for a replicated, multi-zone database. The catch is the smallest instance is small; the moment your working set or connection count grows, you step up instance sizes and the price climbs well past $15. Budget $15/month as a floor, $30 to $60/month as the realistic first year.

Path B, Vitess MySQL (the classic): $39/month floor for the 3-node non-metal cluster, plus storage billed separately. For a small app with a few GB of data, call storage a handful of dollars. Realistic all-in: $40 to $50/month at the entry size, more as instances grow.

So the honest "small production app on PlanetScale in 2026" number is roughly $39 to $70/month once you have a replicated cluster with backups and a little headroom. Not expensive for what it is. Not free either.

When PlanetScale is worth $39-plus a month

Numbers-first does not mean cheapest-always. PlanetScale earns its floor price in specific situations:

• You need Vitess-level horizontal sharding. If you are genuinely heading toward sharded MySQL at scale, PlanetScale is one of very few managed products that does it well. Nothing on the free-tier list below competes here.
• You value the operational tooling. Online schema changes with no downtime, safe branching, and the deploy-request workflow are real engineering time saved. If a bad migration would cost you a night of downtime, the tooling pays for itself.
• Your load is steady, not spiky. PlanetScale's fixed-instance pricing is predictable. A steady 24/7 workload on a fixed instance is often cheaper and calmer than a consumption meter that never stops ticking.

When a cheaper database wins: the crossover math

Here is the part the alternative round-ups skip. The question is not "is there a cheaper database." There always is. The question is at what usage does leaving actually save money, because migrating a production database costs real engineering hours.

The cleanest comparison is Neon (2026), the database most people name as PlanetScale's spiritual successor. Neon keeps a permanent free tier: 0.5 GB of storage and 100 compute-hours per project, with scale-to-zero after five minutes idle. Its first paid "Launch" plan is pure consumption with no monthly minimum: $0.106 per compute-hour and $0.35 per GB-month of storage.

Walk the math for a small, spiky app (a side project, an internal tool, a pre-launch MVP):

• On Neon free tier: $0/month until you exceed 0.5 GB or 100 compute-hours. A low-traffic app that scales to zero overnight can live here indefinitely.
• On Neon Launch, a small always-on-ish app might burn, say, 200 compute-hours and 3 GB storage in a month: roughly 200 x $0.106 + 3 x $0.35 = $22.25/month, and it scales down when idle.
• On PlanetScale, the same app pays the $15 to $39/month floor whether it is busy or asleep, because you are renting an instance, not metering usage.

That is the crossover. Below a steady, meaningful workload, consumption and free-tier databases win because you stop paying when nobody is using the app. Above it, PlanetScale's fixed instance stops looking expensive and starts looking predictable. Supabase (2026) sits in the same free-tier-plus-Postgres category as Neon if you want a second option to price against.

Rough rule from the arithmetic: if your database is idle most of the day or under ~0.5 GB, a free or consumption tier saves you the whole PlanetScale floor. If it is busy around the clock and you need sharding or zero-downtime migrations, the floor is money well spent.

The cheaper-lever move

If you like PlanetScale's tooling but not the bill, the highest-leverage move is not migrating. It is right-sizing:

• Do not run HA in development. The $5 single node is for dev and prototyping. Reserve the $15-plus HA cluster for the environment that actually serves users.
• Watch the storage meter on non-metal plans. Storage is billed separately from the cluster on non-metal Vitess. If storage creep is your surprise, the fix is data lifecycle (archiving old rows), not a bigger instance.
• Consider Metal only when storage is your cost driver. Metal folds storage into the instance price, so it wins when a non-metal storage meter would otherwise dominate your bill. For a small app, non-metal is cheaper.

Match the plan to the environment and most PlanetScale "it got expensive" stories disappear. The bills that shock people are almost always an oversized instance or a runaway storage meter, not the base price.

Math check: for a spiky app under ~0.5 GB or idle overnight, a free or consumption tier costs $0 to ~$22/month versus PlanetScale's $15 to $39/month floor; the fixed floor only pays off once the workload is busy enough that per-hour metering would exceed it.