🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Oh, this is just wonderful. Another announcement that sends a little thrill down the engineering department’s spine and a cold, familiar dread down mine. I’ve just finished reading this lovely little piece, and I must say, the generosity on display is simply breathtaking.

It’s so thoughtful of them to make it sound so easy. “To create a Postgres database, sign up or log in… create a new database, and select Postgres.” See? It's as simple as ordering a pizza, except this pizza costs more than the entire franchise and arrives with a team of consultants who bill by the minute just to open the box.

I’m particularly enamored with their approach to migration. They offer helpful “migration guides,” which is vendor-speak for “Here are 800 pages of documentation. If you fail, it’s your fault, but don’t worry…” And here’s the best part:

...if you have a large or complex migration, we can help you via our sales team...

Ah, my favorite four words: “via our sales team.” That’s the elegant, understated way of saying, “Bend over and prepare for the Professional Services engagement.” Let’s do some quick, back-of-the-napkin math on what this “help” really costs, shall we? I call it the True Cost of Innovation™.

• The Sticker Price: Let’s be conservative and assume their “enterprise” plan, which is never listed, starts at a modest $150,000 a year. A bargain, truly.
• The “Helpful” Migration: That email to postgres@planetscale.com will trigger a response from a very nice salesperson who will quote us a “one-time” migration and setup fee of, let’s say, $75,000. It’s for our own good, you see. To ensure a smooth transition.
• Internal Resources: Of course, our own team has to be involved. I’ll need to pull four of our most expensive engineers off product-facing work for, what, two months? At a fully-loaded cost of about $200k per engineer per year, that’s another $133,000 of our money just... evaporated into the "migration ether."
• The Inevitable Retraining: Our team, who knows Postgres, now has to learn the PlanetScale-proprietary way of doing things. The special dashboard, the unique branching, the “proprietary operator.” That’s another $20,000 in training materials and lost productivity.
• The Emergency Consultant: When—not if—we hit a snag six months down the line with this "Neki" thing that’s been “architected from first principles” (a phrase that makes my wallet physically clench), we’ll have to hire a specialist PlanetScale consultant. Their emergency rate is probably somewhere around $500/hour, with a 100-hour minimum. So, tack on another $50,000 for the inevitable crisis.

So, their beautiful, simple solution, which promises the “best developer experience,” has a Year One true cost of $428,000. And for what? So our queries can be a few milliseconds faster? The ROI on that is staggering. For just under half a million dollars, we can improve an experience that our customers probably never complained about in the first place. We could have hired three junior engineers for that price!

And don’t even get me started on “Neki.” It's not a fork, they assure us. Of course not. A fork would imply you could use your existing Vitess knowledge. No, this is something brand new! Something you can’t hire for, can’t easily find documentation for outside of their ecosystem, and most importantly, something you can never, ever migrate away from without that same half-million-dollar song and dance in reverse. It’s the very definition of vendor lock-in, but with a cute name to make it sound less predatory. They’re not just selling a database; they’re selling a gilded cage, and they’re even asking us to sign up for a waitlist to get inside. The audacity is almost admirable.

Honestly, you have to hand it to them. The craftsmanship of the sales funnel is a work of art. They dangle the performance of “Metal” and the trust of companies like “Block” to distract you while they quietly attach financial suction cups to every square inch of your balance sheet.

It’s just… exhausting. Every time one of these blog posts makes the rounds, I have to spend a week talking our VP of Engineering down from a cliff of buzzwords, armed with nothing but a spreadsheet and the crushing reality of our budget. I’m sure it’s a fantastic product. I’m sure it’s very fast. But at this price, it had better be able to mine actual gold.