PlanetScale was founded in 2018 by Jiten Vaidya and Sugu Sougoumarane, both former YouTube engineers who worked on Vitess — the open-source database clustering system that MySQL uses at Google scale. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and raised $105 million in a Series C round in 2022.
The core idea is simple but powerful: take the battle-tested Vitess technology and offer it as a managed, serverless database platform. PlanetScale gives developers MySQL-compatible databases with features like non-blocking schema changes, database branching (similar to Git branches for your schema), and horizontal sharding — all without downtime.
PlanetScale gained a devoted following among developers, particularly in the serverless and Jamstack communities. Companies like MyFitnessPal, Slice, and Stardust used it for production workloads. The branching workflow, which lets you test schema changes on a branch before merging them to production, was a genuinely fresh take on database management.
In early 2024, PlanetScale made a significant change by discontinuing its free tier, citing the high cost of running managed databases. This was a controversial move that pushed some smaller projects to alternatives. The company also introduced PlanetScale Metal for dedicated infrastructure deployments. Despite the pricing shift, PlanetScale remains a compelling option for teams that need MySQL at scale without the operational burden of managing Vitess themselves.
