PlanetScale

PlanetScale is the serverless database platform built on Vitess (the horizontal-scaling layer behind YouTube's MySQL), famous for database branching: every pull request gets its own copy-on-write database for safe schema migrations via 'deploy requests'. In 2024–2025 the company pivoted significantly — killing the free Hobby tier (April 2024) and adding PlanetScale Postgres alongside MySQL. Current pricing: MySQL Scaler at $39/month (10GB, 1B row reads), Postgres from $5/month single-node. The company is independent, Series C, with $300M+ raised, and remains the default choice for MySQL shops that want serverless without migrating engines.

The honest caveat: killing the free tier burned enormous community goodwill and drove a wave of migrations to Neon and Turso — there is no free way to kick the tires anymore. Vitess disables MySQL foreign keys, which surprises newcomers. The Postgres offering is newer and less differentiated than the MySQL product. At $39/month minimum for MySQL, small projects pay more than Neon ($19) or Turso (free) for equivalent scale.

Sign up at planetscale.com (no free tier — paid from $5/mo Postgres, $39/mo MySQL). Create a database, get the connection string, and connect with any MySQL/Postgres client or Drizzle/Prisma.