RDS vs PlanetScale: Pricing Considerations

The blog post provides an independent pricing evaluation between Amazon RDS and PlanetScale, focusing on when it might be financially advantageous to switch to PlanetScale based on database usage patterns. PlanetScale, a newer entrant in the Database-as-a-Service market, offers a serverless database service powered by Vitess and charges based on rows read, written, and storage used, while Amazon RDS charges using a traditional AWS a-la-carte pricing model. Although both services offer free tiers, PlanetScale's performance is noted to potentially exceed Amazon’s db.t2.micro instance, and its free tier is perpetual compared to Amazon's 12-month cap. The analysis reveals that PlanetScale could be more cost-effective if the number of rows read and written is significantly below its allocation. However, the decision depends on specific database usage patterns, and other factors such as the potential benefits of RDS reserved instances, usage predictability, and feature sets should also be considered.