PlanetScale set a fixed deadline to end its free Hobby plan

The workload

When a vendor discontinues a free tier, the work lands on whoever depended on it: read the announcement, find the deadline, decide whether to pay, migrate, or lose the database. PlanetScale's own announcement, published 6 March 2024, told every Hobby-tier user they had until 8 April 2024 to act. The company's own deprecation FAQ spells out the alternative to paying: exporting the database with the command-line tool before the deadline. For a solo founder, that is at minimum one CLI export, one decision about where the data goes next, and one choice about whether to pay for a replacement or migrate elsewhere.

What the documents show

PlanetScale's own post states, verified, that the company decided to 'part ways with members of our team (primarily Sales and Marketing) and sunset our Hobby plan' in order to project profitability. It states, verified, that 'Our Hobby plan will be retired on April 8th, 2024.' The FAQ adds, verified, that databases not upgraded by that date would be 'put into sleep mode' rather than deleted outright, with a 24-hour temporary wake available afterward to retrieve data, and documents the export path as running 'pscale db dump' from the command line. PlanetScale's current pricing page, retrieved 16 September 2026, confirms there is still no free tier: its listed products price by shard, node, or instance rather than offering a flat free plan. This entry does not restate the separately documented Fly.io and Cloudflare Workers free-tier removals; it adds a third, database-specific instance of the same 2023-2024 pattern.

The operating cost

Before April 2024, PlanetScale's Hobby plan cost $0 per month. After the deadline, the announcement itself states no successor free tier — a founder who wanted to keep running on PlanetScale had to move to a paid, metered plan. PlanetScale's post attributes the decision to profitability rather than to a specific cost figure, and does not publish what share of its user base was on Hobby; this entry does not estimate that number because neither cited document states it.

The stop condition

The FAQ itself names the stop condition: 8 April 2024, after which an unpaid database stops serving and only a 24-hour recovery window remains. That is a vendor-set deadline, not an editorial one. The broader, editorial stop condition for relying on any single vendor's free tier is the same across the free-tier cases this site documents: a free plan financed by a company's growth strategy ends when that strategy changes, and testing the export path before a deadline is announced is the only way to be ready for one.

• Is there a tested, working export path off this vendor today, not just a documented one?
• Would 30 days be enough notice to migrate this workload if the free tier ended tomorrow?
• Does the paid tier's per-unit pricing scale predictably with this project's actual usage?

PlanetScale's stated reason for the change is self-reported reasoning from an interested party about its own business decision; the deadline and the sleep-mode mechanism are verifiable facts stated in the company's own documentation, and the two should not be conflated when citing this case.