PlanetScale has no free tier. Here is where the $5 databases live now.
Short version: PlanetScale has no free tier and has not had one since April 2024. The cheapest thing you can buy today is a single-node PS-5 Postgres cluster at $5 a month, or $15 for the three-node HA version of the same size, with storage, backups, egress and replicas billed on top. That is a real price for a real database, and it is also not what people are searching for. What Hobby provided was a database that cost nothing while it sat idle, and the closest replacements for that are a free tier that hibernates rather than expires: ours is 2 databases, 5 GB and 8 engines with no card, and Turso's free plan is the other one worth a look.
Contents
- PlanetScale is not the villain in this story
- What the free rung was actually holding up
- The $5 shelf in 2026
- What our free tier does, in the specific
- When you should just pay PlanetScale
- FAQ
- Moving, if that is where you landed
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.
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." A PS-5 Postgres cluster is $5 a month as a single node and $15 a month as a three-node HA cluster, and storage, backups, egress and replicas bill on top of whichever you pick. From there the catalog climbs a long way: $5,599 for the largest EBS-backed HA cluster, and past $47,000 for the biggest NVMe metal SKU. The Vitess line is the expensive one, starting at $39 and topping out at $23,979. A lot of the "PlanetScale got expensive" folklore is really about Vitess pricing, or about a large SKU, 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:
| Vendor | Entry price | What meters on top | Free rung |
|---|---|---|---|
| PlanetScale | $5/mo single-node PS-5 Postgres, $15/mo for 3-node HA | Storage, backups, egress, replicas | None since April 2024 |
| Turso | $4.99/mo Developer | Rows read, billed past the included quota | 5 GB, 500M rows read/mo, 100 databases |
| Railway | $0 plan with $1/mo of usage credit | Everything, metered per second | The $1 credit, which does not run a database for a month |
| Layerbase | $0 Free, Solo is $5/month | Nothing | 2 databases, 5 GB, 8 engines, no card |
Competitor rates verified 2026-08-25 from planetscale.com, turso.tech and railway.com.
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 15 minutes 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 two databases that skip 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. The mechanics of the sleeping itself, and why serverless databases elsewhere almost always arrive attached to a meter, are on their own page.
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.
FAQ
Does PlanetScale have a free tier in 2026?
No. Hobby closed to new databases on 6 March 2024 and was retired on 8 April 2024, and the plans page still states plainly that there is no free plan. Nothing has replaced it, and there is no trial rung underneath the paid catalog either.
What is the cheapest PlanetScale database?
$5 a month, for a single-node PS-5 Postgres cluster. The same size as a three-node HA cluster is $15. Both are before storage, backups, egress and replicas, which bill on their own lines, so treat $5 as the floor of an invoice rather than the invoice.
What replaced the PlanetScale Hobby tier?
Nothing at PlanetScale, which is why the search keeps happening. The replacements are elsewhere, and the honest way to sort them is by what happens when the database goes quiet. Turso's free plan gives you 5 GB and 500M monthly rows read. Our free tier is 2 databases, 5 GB and 8 engines with no card, hibernating after 15 idle minutes and waking on the next connection in roughly one to five seconds. Render's free Postgres is a different shape entirely: it expires 30 days after creation regardless of use.
Is PlanetScale still MySQL-only?
No, and this is the folklore that ages worst. They ship Postgres alongside the Vitess line, branching works on both, and PlanetScale Postgres supports the Neon serverless driver's HTTP mode for edge runtimes. If your mental model is "the MySQL host that took away free," it is two years out of date.
Can I get a free MySQL database that does not expire?
Not MySQL itself: on our free tier MySQL is not one of the 8 free engines (it starts on Solo). The closest relational pair is PostgreSQL or MariaDB, a wire-compatible drop-in, and both of those are free with no expiry. Read the sleep behavior before you trust either with anything. Free databases hibernate at 15 idle minutes (30 for MariaDB, which is slower to wake), archive after 14 idle days, and need an explicit Restore click after that. No expiry clock, no card.
Should I move off PlanetScale?
Only if the thing you lost was the $0 rung. If you are running Vitess for sharding, or your team reviews schema changes through deploy requests, or you have one production database and the bill has never surprised you, there is nothing here to fix and moving costs more than it saves.
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.
Keep reading
- Northflank alternatives: a preview environment is not a database branchNorthflank gives every pull request its own stack, and the database in that stack starts empty unless you seed it or restore it from a backup you already had. Here is exactly how their forks work, what a copy-on-write branch does differently, what each one costs while a PR sits open, and the cases where Northflank is the right answer.
- Aiven alternatives: one plan instead of one bill per serviceAiven prices every service on its own hourly meter, so a Postgres plus a MySQL plus a Valkey is three plans and three line items, at three different prices. Here is the arithmetic against a flat Layerbase plan, the real shape of both free tiers, and the four things Aiven does that we do not do at all.
- Free MySQL hosting: start on MariaDB, upgrade to MySQL when you need itMySQL is not on the Layerbase free tier and MariaDB is, and they speak the same wire protocol. Here is the dump command that survives a restricted source account, every error the restore actually throws, what MySQL keeps that MariaDB does not, and the route back to real MySQL later.
- Migrating from PlanetScale to LayerbasePlanetScale retired its free Hobby tier, and the smallest Vitess MySQL cluster is now a 3-node HA SKU at $39 a month. Here is how to move to plain managed MySQL on Layerbase: what changes, how to copy your data with one service token, and the driver swap.