PlanetScale

What is PlanetScale?

Database clusters for Postgres and Vitess MySQL with branching, query insights and sharding at scale.

Who is PlanetScale best for?

PlanetScale is best for engineering teams running busy production databases that need sharding, branching and fast NVMe storage.

• MySQL databases that outgrow one server

  Vitess, which PlanetScale's founders built at YouTube, shards MySQL across many nodes behind one connection.

• Fast production Postgres

  Metal clusters run on locally attached NVMe drives, with a primary and two replicas in each cluster.

• Schema changes without downtime

  Development branches and deploy requests let teams test a schema change and apply it online.

• Finding slow queries

  Insights shows how each query performs in production, and Schema Recommendations suggest changes.

How much does PlanetScale cost?

PlanetScale has no free plan; Postgres starts at $5 a month for a single node and $15 for a three-node high-availability cluster, and Vitess MySQL clusters start at $39 a month.

Prices are the smallest sizes in AWS us-east-1 and vary by cloud and region; backups, egress and extra storage are billed on top. Neki, sharded Postgres, starts at $30 a month per shard plus routers and storage. Single sign-on is $199 a month per organization. Enterprise adds bring-your-own-cloud, a shared Slack channel and custom pricing. New accounts are capped at mid-size clusters until they have paid an invoice of at least $100. Full pricing on planetscale.com. We checked these prices on 8 Nov 2026.

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How do I connect PlanetScale to my AI agent?

PlanetScale MCP is PlanetScale's official MCP server. Add it to your agent once, then ask it to query PlanetScale databases and read Insights on slow queries.

Your agent can work with your PlanetScale databases and branches and read Insights, so you can check schema, run queries and find what is slowing things down.

Claude CodeCursorCodexGitHub Copilot

Terminal

$ claude mcp add --transport http planetscale https://mcp.pscale.dev/mcp/planetscale

Claude Code connects to PlanetScale over the web.

Run /mcp and sign in to PlanetScale in the browser.

Then ask your agent

• Show the schema for the orders table
• List the slowest queries from the last 24 hours
• Count users who signed up this month

Runs

On the web

Sign-in

OAuth

Checked

Answered 13 Nov

Guide

planetscale.com

What are the best PlanetScale alternatives?

Three tools on Recaply do PlanetScale's job. TiDB and Supabase are open source, so you can run them on your own server.

NeonFree

Postgres service that branches like code and scales to zero, with auth and file storage alongside.

TiDBOpen Source

MySQL-compatible distributed SQL database that scales out for transactions, analytics and AI search.

SupabaseOpen Source

Dedicated Postgres per project, plus sign-in, file buckets, edge functions and realtime.

Questions about PlanetScale