PlanetScale Has a Free-Like Experience — Serverless MySQL With Branching, Zero-Downtime Migrations, and Vitess Under the Hood

MySQL is 30 years old and still powers most of the web. But managing MySQL in production — schema migrations, replication, scaling — is a full-time job. PlanetScale takes MySQL and adds what it always needed: git-like branching for schemas, zero-downtime migrations, and serverless scaling . Built on Vitess, the same technology that powers YouTube. Their Scaler plan starts at $39/month with generous usage, and they offer a Hobby tier for development. What Makes PlanetScale Different Schema branching — create a branch, modify schema, merge when ready Zero-downtime migrations — deploy schema changes without locking tables Built on Vitess — horizontal sharding that scales to billions of rows Serverless driver — connect from edge/serverless without connection pooling MySQL compatible — works with any MySQL client, ORM, or tool Insights — query analytics and performance monitoring built in Quick Start 1. Create a Database Sign up at planetscale.com , create a database, grab your connection s