PlanetScale Pricing in 2026 — What You Actually Pay

A single-node PlanetScale Postgres database costs $5 a month. A high-availability three-node cluster starts at $15, Metal (local NVMe storage, unlimited IOPS) starts at $50, and a Vitess MySQL cluster starts at $39. Those are AWS us-east-1 prices — everything PlanetScale publishes is region-dependent, and every number on this page is us-east-1 unless it says otherwise. There’s no free plan. The Hobby tier stopped taking new databases on March 6, 2024 and was retired on April 8, 2024.

Last verified: 26 September 2026. Since the first version on 16 August, PlanetScale shipped Neki, its sharded Postgres engine, into platform preview on 10 September, and the docs Postgres pricing page dropped its static price tables. The entry prices I spot-checked on 26 September were unchanged. The full SKU tables below are from the 16 August fetch.

I re-check this page monthly against PlanetScale’s own pricing pages and changelog, not against other people’s summaries. Database pricing rots slower than per-token AI pricing, but PlanetScale cut two prices in November 2025 and shipped $50 Metal in December, so “slower” is not “never.”

One more thing before the tables. An earlier page on this site described PlanetScale as MySQL-only at $39 a month. It was built on a tool dataset that had gone out of date. PlanetScale flagged it publicly, and they were right. PlanetScale has shipped Postgres since it went GA on September 22, 2025, and $39 is the entry price for one product line, not for PlanetScale. This page is the replacement, checked by hand against planetscale.com/pricing, pricing.md, and the docs on 16 August 2026 — thoroughly enough that I can tell you about a $1 discrepancy in PlanetScale’s own numbers further down.

How the billing works

There are no plan tiers on the self-serve side. You sign up, you’re on the Base plan, and pricing is resource-based: you pay for the instances you run, the storage you use, and any add-ons, prorated to the millisecond. No contract, no sales call. PlanetScale’s own summary of what a bill is made of:

• Postgres: cluster size + storage (EBS) + backups + egress + optional dedicated PgBouncer + optional additional replicas
• Vitess: cluster size + storage (non-Metal) + optional VTGates + replicas and sharding configuration
• Neki: shard compute + routers + network storage + backups + network usage, with every shard in a highly available configuration

A detail I like: PlanetScale publishes a machine-readable pricing page at planetscale.com/pricing.md specifically for AI agents, regenerated on request and stamped with a generation time. It even takes a ?region= query parameter, with 19 region identifiers supported (12 AWS, 7 GCP). In August it also had a gap worth knowing about, which I get to further down.

Postgres: every cluster size, single node and HA

These are the network-attached (EBS) storage clusters, AWS us-east-1, straight from pricing.md. A single node is one instance, no replicas, no high availability. HA is three nodes — one primary plus two replicas across three availability zones, with a 99.99% SLA. Architecture matters: arm64 is cheaper than x86-64 at most sizes.

SKU	Architecture	vCPU	Memory	Single node	HA (3 nodes)
PS-5	x86-64	1/16	512 MiB	$5	$15
PS-5	arm64	1/16	512 MiB	$5	$15
PS-10	arm64	1/8	1 GiB	$10	$30
PS-10	x86-64	1/8	1 GiB	$13	$39
PS-20	arm64	1/4	2 GiB	$17	$50
PS-20	x86-64	1/4	2 GiB	$20	$59
PS-40	arm64	1/2	4 GiB	$28	$83
PS-40	x86-64	1/2	4 GiB	$33	$99
PS-80	arm64	1	8 GiB	$50	$148
PS-80	x86-64	1	8 GiB	$60	$179
PS-160	arm64	2	16 GiB	$96	$286
PS-160	x86-64	2	16 GiB	$117	$349
PS-320	arm64	4	32 GiB	$190	$570
PS-320	x86-64	4	32 GiB	$233	$699
PS-640	arm64	8	64 GiB	$379	$1,135
PS-640	x86-64	8	64 GiB	$467	$1,399
PS-1280	arm64	16	128 GiB	$755	$2,265
PS-1280	x86-64	16	128 GiB	$933	$2,799
PS-2560	arm64	32	256 GiB	$1,510	$4,529
PS-2560	x86-64	32	256 GiB	$1,867	$5,599

Monthly USD, AWS us-east-1, from pricing.md (fetched 2026-08-16). The $5 single node went live on November 14, 2025; the same announcement cut Postgres development branches from $10 to $5 a month.

Metal: prices are banded three ways

Metal clusters run on locally attached NVMe with unlimited IOPS, and the storage is included in the cluster price. That last part changes the shape of the table: every Metal SKU is sold at several storage capacities, each with its own price. There is no such thing as “the M-10 price” — M-10 on arm64 runs from $50 with 10 GiB of storage up to $180 with 200 GiB. Quoting one row as the SKU’s price is exactly the kind of error this page exists to avoid.

Here are the entry configurations (the smallest included storage per SKU), AWS us-east-1, from pricing.md:

SKU	vCPU	Memory	Included storage	arm64	x86-64
M-10	1/8	1 GiB	10 GiB	$50	$60
M-20	1/4	2 GiB	10 GiB	$80	$90
M-40	1/2	4 GiB	10 GiB	$150	$160
M-80	1	8 GiB	100 GiB	$320	$340
M-160	2	16 GiB	100 GiB	$570	$580

All Metal clusters are three-node. The $50 floor is recent: PlanetScale made Metal for Postgres GA at small sizes on December 15, 2025, dropping the minimum from 16 GiB of RAM down to 1 GiB, with storage capacities from 10 GB to 1.2 TB on the new sizes. The pricing.md table runs 95 rows deep and tops out at M-7680 on x86-64 with 61,440 GiB of storage for $47,229 a month. When I checked on 16 August, the docs went further still: their largest published Postgres Metal cluster was 192 vCPUs, 1 TB of RAM, and 122,880 GB of storage at $94,429 a month.

Two operational facts that belong next to any Metal price: the storage does not autoscale (you pick a fixed drive up front), and when the disk has 6GB or less of available space, PlanetScale automatically switches it to read-only until you resize.

Vitess: the MySQL side

Vitess is where the old $39 number comes from. It’s the entry price of a Vitess cluster — three production nodes (one primary, two replicas) plus roughly 1,440 hours of development branch time per month, which PlanetScale describes as the equivalent of five always-on instances. There is no single-node option for Vitess and no PS-5 tier; on pricing.md, Vitess clusters are x86-64 only.

SKU	vCPU	Memory	Monthly price
PS-10	1/8	1 GiB	$39
PS-20	1/4	2 GiB	$59
PS-40	1/2	4 GiB	$99
PS-80	1	8 GiB	$179
PS-160	2	16 GiB	$349
PS-320	4	32 GiB	$699
PS-400	8	32 GiB	$999
PS-640	8	64 GiB	$1,399
PS-700	16	32 GiB	$1,799
PS-900	16	64 GiB	$1,999
PS-1280	16	128 GiB	$2,799
PS-1400	32	64 GiB	$3,599
PS-1800	32	128 GiB	$3,999
PS-2100	48	96 GiB	$5,399
PS-2560	32	256 GiB	$5,599
PS-2700	48	192 GiB	$5,999
PS-2800	64	128 GiB	$7,199

Three-node Vitess clusters, x86-64, AWS us-east-1, from pricing.md. Vitess Metal exists too, from $609 a month (M-160 with 110 GiB included) up to $23,979 (M-5120 with 14,992 GiB), same region. Horizontal sharding is included with Vitess. Sharded Postgres now has its own engine, which is next.

Neki: sharded Postgres, priced but in preview

When this page first went up, Postgres sharding was listed as coming soon under a project PlanetScale calls Neki. It shipped into platform preview on 10 September 2026, and pricing.md now has three Neki tables: Neki standard, Neki metal, and Neki routers.

The shard compute isn’t new pricing. The Neki standard table runs from $30 (PS-10 arm64) to $5,599 (PS-2560 x86-64), the same figures as the HA column in the Postgres table above. Neki metal runs from $589 (M-160 arm64, 118 GiB of storage) up to the same $47,229 top row as Postgres Metal, M-7680 on x86-64 with 61,440 GiB. There’s no $50 way into Neki metal. What is new is the router, a SKU family of its own:

Router SKU	vCPU	Memory	Monthly price
NKR-0	1/32	115 MiB	$6
NKR-640	27	38.75 GiB	$5,260

Those are the smallest and largest router sizes on pricing.md. The top one costs more than 800 times the bottom one, so if you’re estimating a Neki bill, the router line deserves as much attention as the shards. Per pricing.md, “The monthly production router rate covers the three-router baseline: one router in each of three availability zones (AZ)”, production router compute is the router-size monthly rate times observed running routers divided by three, and development router compute is the monthly rate times running routers.

Now the status, which PlanetScale’s own pages don’t agree on. The launch post says “Neki is now available in platform preview” and, just as plainly, “You should not run production workloads on Neki during the platform preview.” The sharding docs call it a Beta Feature under PlanetScale’s terms of service and say it’s “not covered by any service level agreement.” The changelog entry agrees: its title is “Neki is now available in platform preview”. Only the Neki product page drops the qualifier, with “Neki, sharded Postgres, is now available.” I’m going with the blog, the docs and the changelog. They’re the more specific sources, and they’re the ones that tell you what happens if something breaks. No date for leaving preview has been announced, and none of the pages I checked say whether the router prices are final or might change before then.

Storage, egress, and backups

Compute is the number on the pricing page. These are the numbers on the invoice. All Postgres figures, us-east-1. The storage and egress rates came from PlanetScale’s own storage-rate and egress-rate endpoints on 26 September, which returned $0.125 and $0.06. The allowances, backup and private-connection figures are from the Postgres pricing doc. The IOPS and throughput overage rates are no longer printed on any PlanetScale page I checked on 26 September: the Postgres pricing doc now gives only the formula and says “The dashboard shows the IOPS and throughput rates available for the selected storage type and region.” So the table shows the included amounts and sends you to the dashboard for the rate.

Line item	Included	Overage, us-east-1
Network-attached storage	10 GB per cluster	$0.125 per GB/month
IOPS (AWS gp3)	3,000	Shown in the dashboard (not printed in the docs)
Throughput (AWS gp3)	125 MiB/s	Shown in the dashboard (not printed in the docs)
Egress, production branch	100 GB/month	$0.06 per GB
Egress, PS-5 non-HA and dev branches	10 GB/month	$0.06 per GB
Backup storage	2x your disk size	$0.023 per GB/month
Private connection traffic	100 GB/month (production)	$0.01 per GB, both directions

Ingress is free. Backups run automatically every 12 hours at no cost, and overage is billed on the compressed size. The private-connection rate (AWS PrivateLink or GCP Private Service Connect) is flat across regions and replaces the regional egress rate for that traffic — worth knowing if your app servers can sit in the same cloud.

Region matters more than most people budget for. On 16 August the docs’ regional tables had that $0.125 storage rate at $0.238 in AWS sa-east-1 and up to $0.312 on GCP, and the $0.06 egress rate at $0.137 in sa-east-1. I haven’t re-checked those regional figures since. For storage and egress, the rate endpoints take a region parameter, so if you deploy anywhere other than a big US region, pull your region’s rates from them before you estimate anything.

If you’re tallying costs across your whole stack, the Upstash free tier limits cover the caching layer most of these apps put in front of the database.

The line items people forget

Postgres development branches are $5 a month each, prorated to the millisecond, no replicas. Vitess includes about 1,440 dev-branch hours a month, then bills roughly $0.014 an hour beyond that. An additional production branch is billed as a whole new cluster at its size’s price.

Additional Postgres replicas cost about one third of your three-node cluster price — but replicas don’t get the 10 GB storage allowance; they pay for the full configured disk. A dedicated PgBouncer is an optional extra (the local one on your primary is free). In August it was priced at $18 to $551 a month in us-east-1, PGB-5 through PGB-160, but on 26 September I couldn’t find those prices on the pricing page, pricing.md, the Postgres pricing doc or the plans doc, even though all four still mention the add-on. The Postgres pricing doc gives only the rule: dedicated PgBouncer cost is the PgBouncer SKU rate times PgBouncers per availability zone. Check the dashboard for your region’s rate before you budget for one. SSO is a $199 a month add-on on the Base plan.

And one gate that isn’t on the pricing page at all: new accounts are capped at PS-160 (and M-320 for Metal) until you’ve successfully paid an invoice of at least $100. If you were planning to launch straight onto a PS-320, you’ll need to contact them first.

Where PlanetScale’s docs disagreed (August 2026)

When I checked every figure against every page on 16 August, PlanetScale’s pricing surfaces didn’t fully agree with each other. None of it looked intentional. It looked like documentation drift after three price changes in two months.

Since then the docs Postgres pricing page has dropped its static per-SKU tables. It now says “The dashboard and pricing calculator show the current monthly rate for each size,” and points you to a public planetscale_prices table you can query with SQL, plus the storage-rate and egress-rate endpoints. That table holds cluster prices only; PlanetScale says it “does not include extra storage, backups, egress, dedicated PgBouncers, or extra replicas.” So some of what follows can’t be reproduced against the docs as they read today. I’ve kept it, in the past tense, because it’s what the docs said while people were budgeting from them. Not reproducible isn’t the same as fixed.

The big one: in August two docs pages gave Postgres storage overage figures 4x apart. The plans doc said network-attached storage beyond 10 GB was “$0.50 per instance per additional 1 GB.” The Postgres pricing doc’s regional table put us-east-1 at $0.125 per GB per month, and its own worked replica example (a PS-10 with 100 GB billed at $33.75 for additional storage) only added up at $0.125 across three instances. The $0.50 sat in a column shared with Vitess, and I guessed it was the Vitess rate. On 26 September the plans doc appeared to list storage per product, with the $0.50 under Vitess, but I haven’t confirmed that relabelling. The Postgres number itself is solid: PlanetScale’s storage-rate endpoint returned $0.125 for us-east on 26 September.

Two smaller mismatches from August can’t be checked any more. Six of the twenty single-node Postgres prices were $1 lower on the docs pricing page than on pricing.md. All twenty HA rows matched; only these single-node rows were off:

SKU (single node)	pricing.md	Docs pricing page (16 Aug)
PS-80 arm64	$50	$49
PS-160 arm64	$96	$95
PS-160 x86-64	$117	$116
PS-640 arm64	$379	$378
PS-640 x86-64	$467	$466
PS-2560 x86-64	$1,867	$1,866

I trusted pricing.md then and still do. It’s regenerated on request and timestamped (the copy I read on 26 September was stamped 13:02 UTC), and in August it matched the figures the human pricing page served statically: the $5, $15 and $50 entry prices. The $1 gaps read like a rounding artifact on the docs side.

And the Metal rosters didn’t line up. pricing.md listed 95 Postgres Metal configurations topping out at $47,229; the docs listed 92, extending to $94,429. Neither contained the other: pricing.md had arm64 large-storage variants the docs didn’t, and the docs priced five large configurations pricing.md didn’t, including that $94,429 top end. With the docs tables gone, I can’t tell you whether either mismatch was ever corrected. If you’re sizing at the very top end, ask PlanetScale.

Last, a gap rather than a disagreement. On 16 August, pricing.md, the page PlanetScale publishes explicitly for AI agents, contained only cluster prices and the region list. It named storage, backups and egress in its overview but gave no unit price for any of them, so an agent (or a person) sourcing pricing.md alone would miss every non-compute charge on the bill. I haven’t re-tested this since August. What I can say is that the storage and egress rates on this page now come from PlanetScale’s rate endpoints, not from pricing.md. Ask your AI assistant what PlanetScale costs and check whether its answer mentions storage at all.

What isn’t published anywhere

Three figures I went looking for again on 26 September and still couldn’t find. The Enterprise and PlanetScale Managed fee: you pay your own AWS or GCP infrastructure bill plus “a percentage of that cost to PlanetScale,” and that percentage isn’t on the pricing page, pricing.md, or the plans doc. The Business support add-on price: the plans doc and the pricing page both point to the support page, which had no dollar figures when I checked it in August. And per-size VTGate prices (VTG-5 through VTG-1280): every Vitess cluster includes VTGate credits that scale with cluster size, and the docs say VTGate count and size affect the price without giving a table. For the VTGate table I checked the Vitess pricing doc and both pricing pages.

For all three, the honest answer is to talk to PlanetScale, and not to trust any third-party page that prints a number.