PlanetScale has been two products in one. It was born at Youtube as MySQL sharding solution for massive scale. In the last few years though it was adding features usable for developers on the small scale too, who do not need sharding but looking for database with better developer experience than MySQL.
I wonder if this change signals it is "Database for Large amount of Data" is what drives most of business. Companies who have 10TB+ database size, where Sharding is of real value will not think twice about paying $40 to do initial testing on paid account.
Cost may not be an obstacle, but process is. For some companies, getting approval to do that won't be easy. When services have free tiers, people can try them out as individuals before they go on to champion the case for using that tool at work.
A free trial can also work here, but the really short ones don't work well. It's not reasonable to expect people to devote all their attention to evaluating your service. It may take a few weeks or even a month to rack up just a couple hours of trying something out.
Could also be plumping the turkey for sale.. ..who cares about sales and marketing if you’re just worried about cooking the books now and not the long term. Might also explain why there’s the overly rushed 1 month deadline (which is the bit I’ve found hardest to swallow).
As a user of the free tier, the short deadline has really soured my view of the company - I would have transitioned to a paid tier sometime down the line, but that’s not going to happen now. It’s fine if they don’t want to focus on me as a customer. But the tech world is small, I might end up being a decision maker in a tech company with a vldb requirement, is my opinion of planetscale going to be bias because of this now - absolutely.
But either way who cares about the long term if you’re just making yourself pretty in the shop window?
I think so. However it looks to me Plannetscale tried to also become better database for developers... for databases big and small and utililize developer focused product lead growth.
I wonder if this change signals it is "Database for Large amount of Data" is what drives most of business. Companies who have 10TB+ database size, where Sharding is of real value will not think twice about paying $40 to do initial testing on paid account.