AWS is the general-purpose cloud: over 240 services on the homepage, everything priced per hour or per gigabyte, and a structure where a database bill is the sum of instance time, storage, backups, connections and egress. Its simplest entry, Lightsail, packages that into flat monthly bundles - $5 a month for 0.5 GB of memory, 2 vCPUs, 20 GB of SSD and 1 TB of transfer, up to $84 a month for 16 GB - with block storage at $0.10 per GB a month and a load balancer at $18 a month.
TL;DR
AWS sells you components: virtual servers, managed Postgres, storage blocks, load balancers, each metered separately. PlanetScale sells a database product with branching, online schema changes and sharding already wired in, priced from a published catalog that starts at $5 a month for a single-node Postgres. The choice is between assembling and operating the stack yourself, or paying for a database that behaves like a platform.
PlanetScale is a database company. You sign up, pick a cluster size, and get Postgres or Vitess (MySQL) with one primary and two replicas across three availability zones, connection pooling through PgBouncer, unlimited IOPS on NVMe, and schema changes that deploy online and can be reverted. Its pricing page publishes the whole catalog as a machine-readable table generated the same day we fetched it, which is unusual in this market.
The entry points are hard to compare directly because they buy different things. PlanetScale's single-node Postgres starts at $5 a month and its high-availability three-node form of the same smallest size is $15; Metal starts at $50. On AWS, $5 to $15 buys you a small virtual server or a Lightsail database bundle, and everything above that - storage, data transfer, backups - is billed on top.
| Feature | AWS | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|
| What you are buying | Compute, storage and networking you assemble yourself | A managed database with pooling, failover and schema tooling |
| Entry price | Lightsail bundle $5 a month: 0.5 GB memory, 2 vCPU, 20 GB SSD, 1 TB transfer | Postgres single node from $5 a month (1/16 vCPU, 512 MiB) |
| High availability | You configure replication, or use a managed service priced per hour | 1 primary + 2 replicas across 3 AZs: same smallest size at $15 a month |
| Storage cost | Block storage $0.10 per GB a month | Billed on top of compute; included in Metal plans (from $50 a month) |
| Transfer cost | 100 GB free out per month, then tiered per GB | Network egress billed as a usage line |
| Mid-range example | Lightsail $24 a month: 4 GB memory, 2 vCPU, 80 GB SSD, 4 TB transfer | PS-10 arm64 3-node $30 a month; PS-80 arm64 3-node $148 a month |
| Schema migrations | Your tooling, your downtime risk | Online, revertable schema changes built in |
| Sharding and scale | You build it, or move to a different AWS database service | Vitess and Neki shard horizontally as a product feature |
| Contract | Pay as you go by the second or month, cancel per resource | Base plan is month-to-month with no sales conversation; Enterprise adds BYOC |
| Extras in the same account | CDN $2.50-$35 a month, load balancer $18 a month, containers from $7 a month | Add-ons: extra replicas, additional development branch hours, SSO, upgraded support |
Pick AWS if
If you are already running queues, object storage, workers and a frontend on AWS, keeping the database there removes a network boundary and a vendor. Budget for the whole shape of the bill - Lightsail keeps it flat, the main console does not - and staff the operational work that PlanetScale would otherwise do for you.
Pick PlanetScale if
If schema changes, read replicas and horizontal scaling are the problems you actually have, PlanetScale's catalog is refreshingly concrete: $5 for a single node, $15 for the same size in high availability, $50 for Metal, all published with per-SKU rates. You give up the rest of the cloud, so plan on AWS or GCP alongside it - or use its bring-your-own-cloud Enterprise option to run PlanetScale inside your own account.
No independent review data was collected for this comparison, so no user ratings appear here. AWS figures come from Amazon's Lightsail and pricing pages; PlanetScale figures come from planetscale.com/pricing and its published pricing.md catalog, fetched in October 2026.
At the bottom end they are close: PlanetScale's single-node Postgres is $5 a month and a Lightsail bundle is $5 a month. Divergence comes from what is included - PlanetScale's $5 node is a database with pooling and online schema changes, while the Lightsail bundle is a server you configure, and its storage, transfer and backups are billed separately.
Yes, in two ways. The standard service runs on PlanetScale's infrastructure, and Enterprise customers can use PlanetScale Managed to deploy into an AWS or GCP account they own, paying their own cloud provider for the infrastructure plus a percentage to PlanetScale. It is also sold through the AWS and GCP marketplaces.
For MySQL and Postgres workloads, largely yes: you get replicas, failover, pooling and backups as part of the product. What it does not replace is the rest of your architecture - queues, caches, object storage and compute still come from somewhere else.
By topology. The published catalog prices each cluster SKU with a monthly rate and an additional-replica rate, and the Base plan bills for compute, storage, backups, network usage and add-ons. Neki shards each carry a primary and two replicas, so cost scales with shards and replicas rather than with a flat tier.
PlanetScale's $5 single-node plan or AWS Lightsail at $5 are both cheap enough that the deciding factor is maintenance: PlanetScale manages failover and schema safety for you, Lightsail leaves it to you.
On Lightsail: block storage at $0.10 per GB a month, CDN plans from $2.50 a month, a load balancer at $18 a month, containers from $7 a month, plus data transfer out beyond the 100 GB monthly free allowance.
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