PlanetScale has no free tier. Here is where the $5 databases live now.

People still search for the PlanetScale free tier, and the answer has not changed since spring 2024: there is not one. Hobby closed to new databases on 2024-03-06 and was retired on 2024-04-08. The current docs do not hedge about it either. PlanetScale's plans page says outright that PlanetScale does not offer a free plan, and the cheapest thing you can buy starts at $5 a month.

If that search brought you here, you want one of two things. Either a replacement for a database that used to cost nothing, or the cheapest paid database that is not a step down. The second question is the more interesting one, because $5 a month buys strikingly different products depending on who you hand it to.

PlanetScale is not the villain in this story

Two corrections first, because the 2024 deprecation threads have aged into folklore and both halves of the folklore are now wrong.

PlanetScale is not MySQL-only anymore. They ship Postgres alongside the Vitess line, and branching works on both: dev branches and deploy requests on Vitess, dev and production branches on Postgres. There is a Fetch-API serverless driver for edge runtimes, and PlanetScale Postgres supports the Neon serverless driver's HTTP mode. IP restrictions are per database and applied per password, with no plan gate stated. If you carry around a mental model of PlanetScale as a MySQL host that took away the free tier, that model is two years stale.

The entry price is $5, not "tens of dollars." Their Postgres line runs from $5 to $5,599 a month by cluster size, plus storage, backups, egress, and replicas. The Vitess line is the expensive one, starting at $39. A lot of the "PlanetScale got expensive" folklore is really about Vitess pricing being quoted as if it were the whole catalog.

So the thing that actually went away is the $0 rung. That matters more than the rate card, because of what people were using it for.

What the free rung was actually holding up

Three shapes, in my experience, and none of them justify a per-database subscription:

The side project that gets attention in bursts. It runs for a weekend, then sits untouched for six weeks. Paying a monthly fee for six weeks of nothing is exactly the friction that makes people close the tab.

The staging or preview database. It exists so the real one does not get experimented on. It is idle most of the day and nobody wants a line item for it.

The "I want to see what this engine feels like" database. It lives about forty minutes.

Every one of those wants a database that costs nothing while it does nothing, and none of them want a credit card form first. That is the hole Hobby left.

The $5 shelf in 2026

Here is what the entry rung looks like across the vendors people actually compare, from public pricing pages as of July 2026:

The prices cluster. The billing shapes do not, and that is the part worth reading twice. On three of those four rows the entry price is a floor with a meter running on top of it, so the number in the second column is not the number on the invoice.

That is also why "cheapest" is the wrong frame for a replacement. What people liked about Hobby was not that it cost $0. It was that it cost $0 and stayed still.

What our free tier does, in the specific

I build Layerbase, so read this with the appropriate suspicion and check the claims.

The free tier is $0, no card, 2 databases, 5 GB of storage, across 8 engines. A free database hibernates after an hour of no connections and wakes on the next connection in roughly one to five seconds, with nothing for you to click. There is no 30-day timer counting down to deletion, which is worth checking on any free database offer before you put a staging environment on it. Render states its version in the create flow: a free Postgres instance expires after 30 days and the database is deleted unless you move it to a paid type.

Now the part most posts like this skip. Free databases here do go to sleep, and after 14 idle days a free database archives, which is a real state change: the listener and DNS go away and it takes an explicit Restore click to bring it back. Archived free databases get their live resources reclaimed after 90 continuous days, with the most recent backup kept and one click from restored. So this is not "free forever, always warm." It is "free forever, and it goes quiet when you do." For the weekend project that is exactly right. If your side project is a demo you send to strangers and it must answer instantly at 3am, pay for a plan that never archives.

Solo is $5/month for a database that skips the archive pipeline entirely, with 10 GB, 7-day backup retention, and 10 engines to choose from. Pro is $15/month if you want the full catalog and up to 10 databases. Both are flat. There is no meter on queries, connections, rows read, or egress on any plan, including the free one.

I wrote a longer piece on what a free tier has to survive to be worth naming one, in the free tier that stays, including the sleep behavior and why we picked hibernate-and-wake over hard limits.

When you should just pay PlanetScale

Genuinely, not as a rhetorical move before the pitch:

• You are running Vitess for the reason Vitess exists. Horizontal sharding, online schema changes through deploy requests, workloads where the answer to growth is more shards. That is a different class of product and nothing here replaces it.
• Your team's workflow is built on deploy requests. Schema changes reviewed like pull requests is a real discipline, and rebuilding it elsewhere costs more than the subscription.
• You have one production MySQL and the bill is fine. If nothing has surprised you, there is nothing here to fix.

The case for moving is strongest when what you needed from PlanetScale was "a hosted MySQL that does not cost anything while it sits there," because that is precisely the product that no longer exists.

Moving, if that is where you landed

Under the hood it is still MySQL or still Postgres, so the data is portable and the move is a copy plus a connection string. layerbase.com/migrate/planetscale runs it for you: sign in, pick the database, and it copies schema and data across using a short-lived read-only password it mints and then deletes. Nothing gets written back to PlanetScale. The step-by-step version, including the driver swap away from @planetscale/database, is in migrating from PlanetScale to Layerbase.

If you just want the free database back, start there. Two of them, no card, and if it turns out you preferred what you had, you have lost an afternoon.