December 15, 2025
Cheap thrills, pricey feels
$50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres
$50 Postgres goes Metal: indie devs cheer, skeptics grill
TLDR: PlanetScale slashed Postgres “Metal” to $50 with mix-and-match power vs storage, promising fast local drives. The crowd split between hype and homework: fans love the price, skeptics probe instance details, “unlimited I/O” claims, and region surcharges, turning a simple launch into a comment-section cage match.
PlanetScale just dropped its $50 Postgres offering and the comments section exploded like a startup launch party. Indie hackers are chanting “take my money” while pointing at the massive price cut (from $589 to $50) and the mix-and-match setup: you can choose small power and big storage or crank up power with tiny storage. Translation: no more paying for “stuff” you don’t need.
The hype squad is loud—“Let’s gooooo!”—but the tech detectives rolled in fast. One commenter asked what Amazon machines are under the hood, whether each database is on its own box, and if there are limits on read/write speed. Another stepped in with the hot take that it’s locally attached NVMe (fast storage inside the machine) and “unlimited I/O” because your computer chip taps out before the disk does. Cue the meme: “Unlimited I/O until your CPU cries.”
Then the regional pricing twist hit: $50 looks US-first, with Europe +$10 and Australia +$20, sparking a mini skirmish over fairness and latency bragging rights. PlanetScale says it’s live on Amazon regions, on both Intel and ARM chips (think different processor flavors), with Google Cloud and Vitess support “coming soon.” The vibe? Half celebration, half cross-examination, with devs testing whether the deal is as spicy as the comments say. PlanetScale
Key Points
- •PlanetScale lowered PlanetScale Metal for Postgres entry pricing from $589/month to $50/month via the new M-10 tier.
- •New configurations reduce the RAM floor from 16GiB to 1GiB and offer eight storage options from 10GB to 1.2TB, all on local NVMe.
- •CPU and RAM are being decoupled from storage capacity, enabling tailored configurations with at least five storage choices per compute size.
- •The platform supports up to 300GB of storage per GiB of RAM—nearly 4x AWS’s highest native density—or high compute with minimal storage.
- •PlanetScale Metal for Postgres is available in AWS regions on Intel and ARM CPUs; GCP and Vitess support are planned.