Supabase wins for most SaaS startups in 2026. PlanetScale ended its free tier in 2024 and raised prices significantly, making Supabase — which offers PostgreSQL plus auth, storage, and realtime — the clear winner on value, features, and ecosystem.
What Changed With PlanetScale
In early 2024, PlanetScale shut down their free Hobby tier and increased pricing substantially. Their cheapest plan went from $0 to $39/month minimum. This made Supabase’s free tier (which remains generous) far more attractive for early-stage products.
PlanetScale is still an excellent MySQL platform, but the pricing shift eliminated its main advantage for startups.
Supabase
What you get:
- PostgreSQL database (not MySQL — important for ecosystem and tooling)
- Built-in auth (email, OAuth, magic links, MFA)
- File storage (S3-compatible)
- Realtime subscriptions (listen to database changes over WebSockets)
- Edge Functions (Deno-based serverless)
- Row-Level Security (database-level access control)
- Auto-generated TypeScript types from your schema
- REST and GraphQL API auto-generated
Pricing: Free tier includes 500MB database, 1GB storage, 50K MAU. Pro: $25/month.
Best for: Startups that want a complete backend platform. The combination of PostgreSQL + auth + storage + realtime eliminates the need for separate services.
PlanetScale
What you get:
- MySQL database with horizontal sharding
- Branching model (create database branches like Git branches)
- Schema change workflow with deploy requests
- Very high read/write throughput at scale
Pricing: Starts at $39/month (Scaler). Growth: $199/month. No free tier.
Best for: High-scale MySQL applications that need horizontal scaling and a structured schema change workflow. Relevant at $1M+ ARR.
Head-to-Head
| Feature | Supabase | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|
| Database | PostgreSQL | MySQL |
| Free tier | ✅ Generous | ❌ None |
| Auth included | ✅ | ❌ |
| Storage included | ✅ | ❌ |
| Realtime | ✅ | ❌ |
| Row-Level Security | ✅ | ❌ |
| Schema branching | ❌ | ✅ |
| Starting price | $0 / $25 | $39/month |
| Horizontal sharding | ❌ | ✅ |
PostgreSQL vs MySQL: Does It Matter?
For most SaaS products, the choice between PostgreSQL and MySQL is less important than the platform features around it. Both handle standard CRUD operations well.
Where PostgreSQL wins:
- JSONB columns for flexible data
- Full-text search built in
pgvectorfor AI embeddings- Row-Level Security (critical for multi-tenant SaaS)
- More extensions and a wider ecosystem
MySQL wins at horizontal sharding at extreme scale (billions of rows) — which is PlanetScale’s speciality. Most SaaS products never reach this scale.
Our Recommendation
Use Supabase for any new SaaS project. The free tier covers you until significant revenue. The Pro plan at $25/month is excellent value. PostgreSQL is the right database for SaaS. Auth, storage, and realtime being included saves 2–4 weeks of development time.
Consider PlanetScale only if: you’re already on MySQL, you need the branching workflow for a large team, or you’re at extreme scale requiring horizontal sharding.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I migrate from PlanetScale to Supabase? Yes. PlanetScale (MySQL) to Supabase (PostgreSQL) requires a data migration and some schema adjustments. It’s a 1–2 week project. Worth it for the cost savings and additional features.
Does Supabase work with Prisma? Yes. Prisma supports PostgreSQL and works with Supabase. You can use Prisma as your ORM with Supabase as the database.
Is Supabase free tier good enough for a production launch? Yes for early stage. Free tier includes enough for most pre-revenue MVPs. Upgrade to Pro when you have paying customers and need daily backups, more storage, and higher limits.
What about Neon as a Supabase alternative? Neon is serverless PostgreSQL with a branching model similar to PlanetScale. It’s a great alternative if you want the database-only without Supabase’s additional features. Free tier is available.
Does PlanetScale have a future given the pricing changes? PlanetScale pivoted to focus on enterprise customers. It’s a strong product for the right use case (MySQL at scale). But for most startups, it’s no longer competitive against Supabase on value.
Building a SaaS and need the right database setup? At Whipp Studio, we use Supabase on every project — and we set it up right from day one with proper RLS and type generation. Book a free strategy call →