Planetscale forever

I like PlanetScale. I use PlanetScale, incredibly lightly, to power this blog. I mean very incredibly lightly - everything here is so heavily cached that in the past month I have used 3k row reads of the allocated 1 billion afforded by the hobby plan (most of them from my own ip). And I totally understand why they have made the decision to sunset their hobby plan. They do not need me, and I honestly do not need them - especially at $39/month. An interesting sidebar in this blog post is that they have also laid off primarily their Sales and Marketing staff. The fact that they felt the need to point this out (sales and marketing, not engineering!) seems to indicate that they will focus on their enterprise offerings from here in.

There are a few alternatives that I am weighing up, and I am sure each of them will see a flood of leeches arriving over the next months, ready to suck up storage, a little compute, and plenty of support time. neon.tech, supabase and turso are front runners for most, both with plenty of testimonials from the likes of ThePrimeagen, Kent C Dodds, M. Jackson and co.

One has to wonder if the announcement from PlanetScale is a harbinger of a shift in strategy for serverless databases/platforms in general. The market is increasingly becoming saturated, and the value from hobbyists on free tiers is surely diminishing as awareness of serverless solutions rises.

I am personally leaning towards Cloudflare D1, since I am already using their Pages, Cache, Workers, and KV products (yes, all of them, and all on this tiny blog. I will write about that one day). But really, as it was with PlanetScale (and Supabase as I toyed with beforehand), it would only be to kick the tires. Even then, I would hope that nobody in the near future will be listening to me about where and how to host their storage solutions. Ask me something about CSS, not about SQL.

If not D1, I will likely revert to SQLite sitting on my homelab in my office, as I have increasingly been doing lately for everything from git hosting & CI/CD to DNS hosting and bookmark management.

It's a great time to be a web developer, with the sheer amount of interesting, free, and high-quality services out there, both open source and for-profit. I wish Planetscale all the best, and can only thank them for everything I've learnt from their platform.

Now, to start the export. On second thoughts, maybe I should just use git and markdown…