PlanetScale
PlanetScale is a fully managed cloud database platform offering Vitess/MySQL and PostgreSQL with NVMe-backed Metal performance, online schema changes, branching, and sharding. Founded in 2018 by Vitess creators, it serves enterprise and startup customers via usage-based and enterprise pricing on AWS and GCP.
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2018
- HeadquartersMountain View, United States
- Headcount51–100
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingSoftware
What PlanetScale does
PlanetScale is a fully managed cloud database platform founded in 2018 by the co-creators and maintainers of Vitess, the open-source MySQL sharding system originally developed at YouTube. The company offers two core engines—PlanetScale Vitess (MySQL-compatible with explicit horizontal sharding) and PlanetScale Postgres (managed PostgreSQL with high availability across three availability zones, automated failover, PgBouncer connection pooling, and branching)—both available in AWS and GCP on a high-performance tier called PlanetScale Metal, which runs on local NVMe drives to deliver effectively unlimited IOPS at materially lower cost than network-attached alternatives like Aurora or Cloud SQL. On top of the core databases the platform layers branching and deploy requests with online schema migrations and instant revert, PlanetScale Insights (100% query observability), Database Traffic Control (Postgres resource-budget enforcement), the PlanetScale Global Network (CDN-style edge layer with latency-based replica routing), and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for AI agents such as Claude and Cursor.
The product surface is being extended to Postgres sharding through Neki, a next-generation sharded Postgres architecture built by the Vitess team, and the company is expanding the ecosystem with the Drizzle ORM integration and partnerships spanning Stripe Projects, Cloudflare Hyperdrive, WorkOS, and the Cursor marketplace. PlanetScale generates revenue through usage-based Base plan subscriptions (Postgres single node from $5/month, Postgres Metal from $50/month, plus per-GB storage and egress fees), custom-priced Enterprise contracts (with Business or Enterprise support, 15-minute P1 response, migration assistance, and optional single-tenant or PlanetScale Managed/BYOC deployment into customer-owned AWS/GCP accounts), and marketplace commissions on AWS Marketplace and Google Cloud Marketplace. Customers span enterprise (Block/Cash App running 400+ shards and 3-4M QPS at peak, Intercom, MyFitnessPal, Figma, HubSpot, GitHub, Slack, Etsy) and a long tail of startups and SMBs (Dub, Superwall, Magicare, WhyDonate, Core Flow AI, Anysphere/Cursor). The company is headquartered in San Francisco, operates a globally distributed remote-forward team of 51-100, and is led by CEO Sam Lambert with co-founders Sugu Sougoumarane (CTO) and Jitendra Vaidya (CSO) anchoring the engineering and Vitess continuity.
PlanetScale firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- PlanetScale
- Legal name
- PlanetScale, Inc.
- Website
- https://planetscale.com
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2018
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 51–100 employees
- Short description
- PlanetScale is a fully managed cloud database platform offering Vitess/MySQL and PostgreSQL with NVMe-backed Metal performance, online schema changes, branching, and sharding. Founded in 2018 by Vitess creators, it serves enterprise and startup customers via usage-based and enterprise pricing on AWS and GCP.
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
PlanetScale industry classification
Industry- Product category
- Managed Cloud Databases
- NAICS
- Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (5182), Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (518), Computer Facilities Management Services (541513), Computer Systems Design and Related Services (54151)
- SIC
- Services-Prepackaged Software (7372), Services-Computer Programming, Data Processing, Etc. (7370), Services-Computer Integrated Systems Design (7373)
- akta.pro primary industry
- Cloud-Native Development (Containers, Kubernetes, Microservices) (BPAEACAD)
- akta.pro secondary industry
- Cloud Storage Gateways & Hybrid Storage (HDABAEAI)
Keywords
Where PlanetScale is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- Mountain View
- HQ country
- United States
- HQ region
- North America
Offices7 records
Markets served
PlanetScale business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Technology or R&D, Infrastructure, Personnel, Marketing or Sales, Operations
Revenue model
- Usage-based Base plan subscriptions (Postgres and Vitess): Pay-as-you-go monthly billing for self-serve Postgres and Vitess clusters, with pricing driven by instance/VTGate size, storage (first 10 GB included, then $0.50/GB/instance), and egress ($0.06/GB after 100 GB included). Postgres single-node starts at $5/month, Metal starts at $50/month, and add-ons (extra branch hours, SSO, upgraded support) are itemized.
- Enterprise plan contracts: Custom-priced Enterprise plan with annual/multi-year contract structure, including Business or Enterprise support, shared Slack channel, bi-weekly meetings, 15-minute P1 response, single-tenant or BYOC deployment, and migration assistance.
- PlanetScale Managed (BYOC) take rate: When deployed into a customer's own AWS/GCP account, customer pays the cloud provider directly for infrastructure and a percentage of that cost to PlanetScale for platform, infrastructure management, migration assistance, and support.
- AWS Marketplace and GCP Marketplace purchases: PlanetScale is available on AWS Marketplace and Google Cloud Marketplace, allowing customers to purchase through their cloud commitments and apply spend to AWS/GCP EDP.
- Professional services and migration assistance: Enterprise plan includes hands-on migration assistance, sharding design, load testing, architecture consultation, and a Solutions team engagement as part of the subscription.
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription | Monthly | Postgres Single node — from $5/month |
| Subscription | Monthly | Postgres High Availability (1 primary + 2 replicas across 3 AZs) |
| Subscription | Monthly | Postgres Metal — from $50/month |
| Subscription | Monthly | Vitess (MySQL-compatible horizontal sharding) |
| Subscription | Multi-year contract | Enterprise plan (custom) |
| Other | Pay-as-you-go | Discounts and add-ons |
Go-to-market motion5 records
Distribution channels8 records
Marketing channels19 records
PlanetScale product offering
Product offeringCore offering
PlanetScale operates a fully managed cloud database platform that delivers horizontally sharded Vitess/MySQL and PostgreSQL databases on local NVMe-backed storage. Its offering combines the Vitess open-source sharding engine, a PlanetScale Global Network edge layer, branching with online schema changes, full-query observability via Insights, and Bring-Your-Own-Cloud (PlanetScale Managed) deployment options for regulated enterprises.
Product overview
PlanetScale offers a unified managed database platform that supports two core database engines (PlanetScale Vitess for MySQL-compatible workloads at hyperscale and PlanetScale Postgres for managed PostgreSQL), both available on a high-performance NVMe-backed tier called PlanetScale Metal. The platform is built on Vitess, the open-source sharding system co-created by PlanetScale's founders at YouTube, and is being extended to Postgres through Neki, the next-generation sharded Postgres architecture in development. On top of the core databases, PlanetScale ships a suite of integrated capabilities including Database Traffic Control (resource budgets for Postgres query traffic), PlanetScale Insights (full 100% query observability), Branching and Deploy Requests with online schema migrations and reverts, the PlanetScale Global Network and Global Replica Credentials (CDN-like database connectivity), the PlanetScale MCP Server (Model Context Protocol integration for AI agents like Claude and Cursor), and PlanetScale Managed (a bring-your-own-cloud Enterprise deployment). The platform also offers pscale CLI, a Terraform provider, and a public REST/RPC API for automation. Pricing starts at $5/month for Postgres single node, $50/month for Postgres Metal, and is available in AWS and GCP.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Brands
- Vitess: Open source database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL, originally created at YouTube, now maintained and managed by PlanetScale.
- Neki
- PlanetScale Metal
Products and services
- PlanetScale Vitess (MySQL) Managed MySQL-compatible database service built on Vitess that provides horizontal sharding, connection pooling via VTGate, online schema migrations, and automatic failover for very large scale MySQL workloads.
- PlanetScale Postgres Fully managed PostgreSQL cluster with high availability across three availability zones, automated failover, PgBouncer connection pooling, branching, automated backups, and Database Traffic Control. Starts at $5/month and is generally available in AWS and GCP.
- PlanetScale Metal High-performance database tier that uses local NVMe drives to deliver effectively unlimited IOPS and ultra-low latencies for both Vitess and Postgres workloads, starting at $50/month for Postgres Metal.
- Neki Next-generation Postgres sharding architecture built from first principles by the team behind Vitess to bring massive scale and fault tolerance to PostgreSQL workloads. Currently available via waitlist and planned for open source release.
- PlanetScale Insights (Query Insights) Database observability tool that tracks statistics for every query running against a PlanetScale database (100% query capture rather than random sampling), providing query patterns, cluster health overview, and actionable recommendations.
- PlanetScale MCP Server Model Context Protocol server that connects AI tools (Claude, Cursor) directly to a PlanetScale database for schema optimization, query debugging, and CPU usage diagnosis, with an Insights-only variant for safe AI-driven analysis.
- PlanetScale Managed (Bring Your Own Cloud) Packaged data plane that deploys PlanetScale into a customer's own AWS sub-account or GCP project, enabling single-tenant, in-cloud-account deployment with PlanetScale's branching, deploy requests, and monitoring for regulated workloads.
- Database Traffic Control Postgres traffic management system that lets users define resource budgets (CPU, CPU burst, backend concurrency, per-query timing) on subsets of traffic via query fingerprint, app name, Postgres user, or sqlcommenter tags, with warn and enforce modes.
Quantifiable outcome
- 64% cost savings and 50% reduction in p99 latency for Block (Cash App) after moving to PlanetScale Metal
- +12 more outcomes
Companies that use PlanetScale
Customer profileNamed customers25 records
Segments6 records
Ideal customer profiles4 records
PlanetScale technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- Yes
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Integration14 records
AI capability8 records
Feature10 records
PlanetScale partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
14 partnerships are on record, tiered flagship launch partner, strategic integration, high (acquisition-style), mid-tier (community), mid-tier (ecosystem), mid-tier (integration) and flagship distribution partner.
- Stripeflagship launch partnerPlanetScale is a co-design and launch partner for Stripe Projects (developer preview, March 2026), letting developers provision and pay for PlanetScale Postgres and MySQL databases from the Stripe CLI across US, EU, UK, and Canada.
- Cursor (Anysphere)strategic integrationPlanetScale is a launch partner for the Cursor marketplace plugin ecosystem (March 2026) alongside Atlassian, Datadog, GitLab, Glean, Hugging Face, and monday.com. The plugin uses MCP integration to let cloud agents read from, write to, and act on PlanetScale.
- Drizzlehigh (acquisition-style)Drizzle joined PlanetScale, announced on the PlanetScale blog in March 2026 as a Company-category post by Sam Lambert.
- Perconamid-tier (community)Percona engineers joined PlanetScale engineers in the January 2026 MySQL community meeting in San Francisco to evaluate options for MySQL's future beyond Oracle, including a possible community-led fork.
- Convexmid-tier (ecosystem)Co-hosted 'Convex & PlanetScale for Postgres Fireside Chat' (July 2025) and 'DX and Databases for Startups that Scale' meetup (September 2025) in San Francisco. Convex migrated to PlanetScale for Postgres and is featured as a customer.
- Cloudflare (Hyperdrive)mid-tier (integration)Cloudflare Hyperdrive integration with PlanetScale Postgres, featured in a February 2026 tutorial blog post on building real-time applications over the Cloudflare global network.
- WorkOSmid-tier (integration)Organization SSO domain verification is managed through WorkOS, released June 2026.
- AWS (Amazon Web Services)flagship distribution partnerPlanetScale runs on AWS and is available on the AWS Marketplace; PlanetScale Managed can deploy into customer-owned AWS sub-accounts and supports Reserved Instances / Savings Plans.
- Google Cloud (GCP)flagship distribution partnerPlanetScale runs on GCP, is available on the Google Cloud Marketplace, and supports PlanetScale Managed deployments in customer-owned GCP projects. New Eemshaven (Netherlands) region added April 2026.
- Fivetranmid-tier (integration)Listed as a Vitess integration partner on the PlanetScale features and integrations page.
- Airbytemid-tier (integration)Listed as a Vitess integration partner on the PlanetScale features and integrations page.
- Hightouchmid-tier (integration)Listed as a Vitess integration partner on the PlanetScale features and integrations page.
- Datadogmid-tier (integration)Listed as a Vitess integration partner on the PlanetScale features and integrations page.
- Debeziummid-tier (integration)Listed as a Vitess integration partner on the PlanetScale features and integrations page, used for change data capture.
Scale indicators20 records
Recent moves7 records
Expansion highlights6 records
PlanetScale competitors and assessment
Company assessmentDirect peers
- Supabase: Managed Postgres BaaS with developer-first PLG motion, branching, and self-serve tiers. Most direct competitor in the Postgres cloud platform space — Core Flow AI cited PlanetScale as offering 1.5x better performance at half the cost vs Supabase.
- Neon: Serverless Postgres with similar developer-first positioning and branching model. Acquired by Databricks, raising competitive intensity. OpenSecret and others cited as migrations from Neon to PlanetScale.
- Cockroach Labs: Distributed SQL database (Postgres-compatible) targeting horizontally-scalable OLTP. Directly comparable scaling pitch and enterprise posture to PlanetScale Vitess; competing for the same hyperscale-sharding workloads.
- PingCAP (TiDB): MySQL-compatible distributed SQL database with horizontal sharding. Directly comparable to PlanetScale Vitess for MySQL-scale OLTP workloads; open-source core with managed cloud offering.
- Yugabyte: Postgres-compatible distributed SQL database targeting horizontal scale and cloud-native deployments. Competes for the same hyperscale OLTP workloads as PlanetScale Vitess and Neki.
- Crunchy Data: Managed Postgres provider with enterprise focus and open-source Postgres contributions. Head-to-head competitor in PlanetScale's published benchmark (PlanetScale Metal is 1.4-7.4x faster than Crunchy).
Broad incumbents
- MongoDB: MongoDB Atlas is a broad managed database platform serving OLTP and document workloads. Larger, more established player with broader portfolio; competing for the same enterprise database modernization budgets.
- AWS (Aurora, RDS): AWS Aurora MySQL/Postgres and RDS are the dominant cloud-managed relational databases that PlanetScale Metal benchmarks against (and outperforms on PlanetScale's published tests). Native cloud integration gives AWS structural advantages despite the performance gap.
Emerging players
- SingleStore: Distributed SQL database with MySQL wire compatibility and cloud-managed offering. Targets similar high-throughput OLTP use cases; smaller scale and narrower Postgres positioning than PlanetScale.
- TigerData (Timescale): Managed Postgres optimized for time-series and analytics workloads. Listed as a head-to-head comparison in PlanetScale's published Postgres Metal benchmarks; competing for the same Postgres cloud budget.
Market position
Strengths5 records
Weaknesses5 records
Competitive moat8 records
Key risks6 records
Key highlights7 records
Customer concentration
PlanetScale social profiles
Digital presencePlanetScale compliance and trust
Trust signalCompliance4 records
PlanetScale financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
PlanetScale leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles6 records
PlanetScale funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds4 records
Investors6 records
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
PlanetScale M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about PlanetScale
What does PlanetScale do?
PlanetScale operates a fully managed cloud database platform that delivers horizontally sharded Vitess/MySQL and PostgreSQL databases on local NVMe-backed storage. Its offering combines the Vitess open-source sharding engine, a PlanetScale Global Network edge layer, branching with online schema changes, full-query observability via Insights, and Bring-Your-Own-Cloud (PlanetScale Managed) deployment options for regulated enterprises.
Is PlanetScale a public or private company?
PlanetScale is a private company. It is classified as venture growth investor backed and is currently operating.
When was PlanetScale founded?
PlanetScale was founded in 2018. It employs 51 to 100 people.
Where is PlanetScale based?
PlanetScale is headquartered in Mountain View, United States, in the North America region.
How does PlanetScale make money?
Five revenue lines are on record. Usage-based Base plan subscriptions (Postgres and Vitess) is the primary driver. The others are enterprise plan contracts, planetScale Managed (BYOC) take rate, AWS Marketplace and GCP Marketplace purchases and professional services and migration assistance.
Who are PlanetScale's main competitors?
Direct peers on record are Supabase, Neon, Cockroach Labs, PingCAP (TiDB), Yugabyte and Crunchy Data. Broad incumbents are MongoDB and AWS (Aurora, RDS). Emerging players are SingleStore and TigerData (Timescale).
Does PlanetScale have an API?
Yes. PlanetScale offers a public API and CLI for managing databases. Developers can use the API to automate budget creation in deployment pipelines (e.g., Traffic Control), create and manage databases/branches, view maintenance schedules, and run check endpoints such as the deploy request storage check API. The pscale CLI provides commands such as `pscale branch connections top` for live connection management, `pscale traffic-control` for managing Database Traffic Control budgets and rules, and `pscale shell --replica` for replica connections. PlanetScale also offers an RPC API to support libraries like database-js. Developer documentation is at planetscale.com/docs.
What industry is PlanetScale in?
PlanetScale's product category is Managed Cloud Databases. Its primary akta.pro industry code is BPAEACAD, Cloud-Native Development (Containers, Kubernetes, Microservices), with a secondary code of HDABAEAI, Cloud Storage Gateways & Hybrid Storage. Its NAICS code is 5182 and its SIC code is 7372.