Best PlanetScale Alternatives for Indie Hackers in 2026

PlanetScale removed its free Hobby tier in April 2024. If you were using PlanetScale because it offered a free MySQL database with solid developer tooling, that option is gone. The cheapest plan is now $5/month for a single-node Postgres database, and a production-ready HA setup starts at $15/month.

PlanetScale also pivoted significantly in 2024-2025, moving from a MySQL/Vitess-only offering to adding PlanetScale Postgres. So if you were on PlanetScale for MySQL compatibility, the product has changed too.

That said, $5-15/month is still reasonable for a production database. The reason to look at alternatives is either the missing free tier for development databases, or a need for a different feature set: a full backend platform, edge SQLite, or distributed SQL at hyperscale. Here are four options worth considering.

Quick Verdict

Neon

Neon is the most direct replacement for PlanetScale in 2026. It is serverless Postgres with a real free tier, scale-to-zero billing, and database branching that works like Git branches for your schema.

Pricing: The free tier includes 0.5 GB of storage, 100 compute-unit hours per month, and scale-to-zero always active. No credit card required. The Launch paid plan starts at $5/month minimum, with compute billed at $0.14 per CU-hour and storage at $0.35 per GB-month. The Scale plan at $0.26/CU-hour adds read replicas, SOC2 Type 2, and HIPAA eligibility.

Neon was acquired by Databricks in May 2025 for approximately $1 billion. That acquisition reduced compute pricing 15-25% and cut storage pricing from $1.75 to $0.35/GB-month. If you evaluated Neon before mid-2025, the pricing is now meaningfully cheaper.

What you get over PlanetScale: A free tier, which PlanetScale no longer offers. Scale-to-zero means development databases and staging environments cost nothing when idle. Database branching lets you clone your entire database in seconds for testing schema migrations without affecting production.

The catch: Neon's free tier has a hard limit of 0.5 GB storage. For a growing SaaS with real user data, you will hit this quickly. The Launch plan's usage-based billing means monthly costs vary, which makes budgeting less predictable than PlanetScale's flat-rate plans. A typical small SaaS with moderate traffic runs $15-50/month on Launch, which is still cheaper than PlanetScale's $15/month HA entry point but harder to predict upfront.

One practical gotcha: frontend polling patterns (React Query intervals, WebSocket keepalives, health checks) can prevent scale-to-zero from activating. If cost optimization matters, audit what is keeping connections alive.

Who should switch: Solo developers and indie hackers building Postgres-based apps who need a free development database and want scale-to-zero economics for side projects with variable traffic.

Who should not: Teams with predictable, always-on production databases may find flat-rate pricing easier to budget. PlanetScale's $15/month HA setup is simpler to reason about than Neon's usage-based model.

Turso

Turso offers the most generous free tier of any database in 2026. You get 100 databases, 5 GB of storage, and 500 million row reads per month at no cost. The key difference from the other options: Turso is not Postgres. It is built on libSQL, a fork of SQLite.

Pricing: Free tier includes 100 databases, 5 GB storage, 500 million rows read per month, and 10 million rows written per month. The Developer plan costs $4.99/month and unlocks unlimited databases with 9 GB of storage. The Scaler plan at $24.92/month adds 24 GB and support for 2,500 active databases per month.

What you get over PlanetScale: The free tier is real and generous. The SQLite compatibility means your existing SQLite code, ORMs, and tools work without changes. Turso supports multi-region replication and embedded replicas, which place a local SQLite copy inside your application process for sub-millisecond read latency.

The catch: Turso is SQLite, not MySQL or Postgres. If your app depends on Postgres-specific extensions, functions, or tooling, Turso is not a drop-in replacement. SQLite also handles concurrent writes differently than traditional client-server databases, which can be a constraint for write-heavy workloads.

Who should switch: Developers building multi-tenant SaaS apps (database-per-tenant pattern fits perfectly with Turso's unlimited databases), edge applications, or local-first software where SQLite compatibility is an advantage. If you are building something like a note-taking tool, a developer CLI, or an app where each user has their own isolated dataset, Turso is built exactly for this pattern.

Who should not: Anyone whose app is tightly coupled to Postgres or MySQL and cannot move to SQLite. The database engine difference is not trivial to abstract away.

Supabase

Supabase is more than a database. You get Postgres plus authentication, file storage, realtime subscriptions, and edge functions in one platform. If you were using PlanetScale alongside a separate auth service and storage bucket, Supabase consolidates all of that.

Pricing: The free tier includes 500 MB of database storage, 1 GB of file storage, 50,000 monthly active users for auth, and up to 2 projects. Free projects automatically pause after 7 days of inactivity and take a few seconds to resume. The Pro plan costs $25/month with 8 GB database, 100 GB file storage, and no inactivity pausing.

What you get over PlanetScale: A complete backend platform. Auth, storage, realtime, and edge functions are all included. For solo developers building an MVP, Supabase can replace several services at once.

The catch: The free plan's 7-day inactivity pause is a real problem for side projects you check in on occasionally. Visiting your own app after a week of inactivity produces a slow first load while the database wakes up. This has caught out many indie hackers who demoed their app to a potential customer after a break and had an awkward 10-second wait. The Pro plan at $25/month removes this, but that is more expensive than Neon Launch or Turso Developer for a database-only need.

Supabase also does not scale to zero. Your Postgres compute runs continuously once you are on Pro. Good news: no cold starts. Less good news: you pay for compute all the time.

Who should switch: Indie hackers who want auth, storage, and realtime alongside their database and are happy to pay $25/month once their project needs production reliability. For a full overview of what to compare, the best Supabase alternatives post covers the full range of options in this category.

Who should not: Developers who only need a database. For a plain Postgres replacement, Supabase's additional platform features are overhead you do not need to pay for.

CockroachDB

CockroachDB fills a different gap. PlanetScale's Vitess product offered MySQL at hyperscale with horizontal sharding and multi-region high availability. CockroachDB is the closest alternative for that use case, though it is PostgreSQL-compatible rather than MySQL-compatible.

Pricing: The Basic plan offers a $400 trial credit and an ongoing $15/month in free resource utilization for pay-as-you-go accounts. Usage is billed based on Request Units (RUs) and storage per GB-month. The Standard and Advanced plans add dedicated resources and higher SLA guarantees.

What you get over PlanetScale: A free tier (PlanetScale has none), distributed SQL with multi-region deployment, and strong consistency guarantees across nodes. CockroachDB is built for the scenario where you need your database to survive datacenter failures without downtime.

The catch: CockroachDB is engineered for enterprise-scale problems. The pricing model (Request Units) is harder to reason about than flat-rate plans, and production costs can reach $500 to $5,000 per month depending on transaction volume. For an indie hacker building a typical SaaS app, CockroachDB is overkill. Neon or Supabase are the right tools; CockroachDB is relevant only if distributed SQL or multi-region compliance is an actual requirement.

Who should switch: Teams running MySQL on PlanetScale Vitess who need horizontal sharding, multi-region deployment, or survive-anything availability guarantees, and can move to a PostgreSQL-compatible interface.

Who should not: Solo developers building standard SaaS apps. The learning curve and pricing model are designed for engineering teams, not individuals.

How to Choose

If you just need to replace PlanetScale's free tier: Neon. Free tier, real Postgres, scale-to-zero, no credit card required.

If you are building a multi-tenant app or edge application and SQLite works for your stack: Turso. Most generous free tier in this category.

If you want auth, storage, and realtime alongside your database: Supabase. More expensive for database-only use, but replaces multiple services at once.

If you were on PlanetScale Vitess for distributed MySQL at scale: CockroachDB. Not a perfect swap (Postgres, not MySQL), but the closest alternative for high-availability distributed SQL.

For a deeper look at how Neon, Turso, and Supabase compare head to head on performance and developer experience, see the Supabase vs Firebase comparison for context on how the broader database-as-a-service market has evolved.