The Showdown

PlanetScalevsvitess

Why pay monthly fees for PlanetScale when you can self-host vitess for free? Let's look at the facts.

PlanetScale

The Expensive Option

  • Closed Source (Black box)
  • Expensive monthly fees per user
  • Data stored on their servers
WINNER

vitess

The Freedom Choice

  • 100% Open Source Code
  • Free forever (Self-hosted)
  • You own your data completely
Interactive Calculator

Calculate Your "SaaS Tax"

SaaS pricing is designed to scale with your success. See how much wealth transfers from your bank account to PlanetScale's shareholders.

10 people
150100200+
$

*Estimated standard pricing for PlanetScale. Adjust if needed.

Estimated Annual Waste
$1,440
Monthly Burn Rate$120
5-Year Projection$7,200
Cost with Self-Hosted$0
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Calculations based on 10 users at $12/mo.

Detailed Breakdown

0
Managed sharding-as-a-service
Transparent application-level sharding
1
Cloud-native redundancy
Built-in failover and backups
2
Often requires specific drivers
Full MySQL protocol compatibility