PlanetScale performs layoff and prioritizes profitability(planetscale.com) |
PlanetScale performs layoff and prioritizes profitability(planetscale.com) |
I wonder if this change signals it is "Database for Large amount of Data" is what drives most of business. Companies who have 10TB+ database size, where Sharding is of real value will not think twice about paying $40 to do initial testing on paid account.
A free trial can also work here, but the really short ones don't work well. It's not reasonable to expect people to devote all their attention to evaluating your service. It may take a few weeks or even a month to rack up just a couple hours of trying something out.
As a user of the free tier, the short deadline has really soured my view of the company - I would have transitioned to a paid tier sometime down the line, but that’s not going to happen now. It’s fine if they don’t want to focus on me as a customer. But the tech world is small, I might end up being a decision maker in a tech company with a vldb requirement, is my opinion of planetscale going to be bias because of this now - absolutely.
But either way who cares about the long term if you’re just making yourself pretty in the shop window?
Hasn't this always been the case?
Personally, I'm glad I haven't built something on PS Hobby that I have to migrate but I do think its fair to charge for your product.
[0] https://twitter.com/PlanetScale/status/1765438197981708684
These are potential paying users not freeloaders to evict.
This is a mentality shift from the investor side. You would be shot down if you said we're focusing on profits/revenue rather than growth from 2010 to 2021. Now it's shifted from growth to profitability.
A bunch of companies were burning money rather than making it for a decade.
#planetscale_forever
Planetscale is definitely popular and they get a lot of free advertisement from tech influencers (may change without the free tier) but most people I know in enterprise haven't heard of it.
I think startups should use seed rounds to become profitable. It's the only way to secure your future. You can be profitable and grow fast. See Notion and Linear.
Without any inside knowledge, I can only speculate, and who knows, maybe PlanetScale wouldn’t have been able to continue as a business, if they kept serving the Hobby plan
What I am quite certain of though, is that PlanetScale is far from ubiquitous enough to have people take a bet on a service they’ve never tried, without a way to try it risk-free first
It’s a competitive space, and killing your funnel of “Engineers learning technologies as a side-project, and bringing they tech into their day job” seems to me at least to be very shortsighted
Overall I think this announcement leads to more questions.
Going full enterprise by shutting down hobby plans while laying off primarily sales and marketing.
With killing free tier I wonder if it just was not generating a good conversion to paid users or is it killing a golden goose to get one time customer injection from folks choosing to move to paid tier
At the end of the day, it's not cheap (and certainly not free) to maintain databases and infrastructure, especially with the additional features PlanetScale has.
For those that don’t have experience running companies with permissive free tiers, free tiers often act as a honeypot for a certain category of users that (1) don’t and will never pay for your product, (2) complain loudly and often and (3) eat up your support time.
This category of user is equally toxic to any competitor’s platform. The best B2B companies paywall early and set the bar high.
Whether or not these folks on free plans are ever going to convert to paid, they trusted PlanetScale to serve as a critical building block for their project/business. I think the least they could do is ease the transition by offering them a reasonable amount of time to offboard.
I personally would never trust critical infra to a company that has ever abruptly terminated a product offering with only 1 month notice.