// 3 comparisons in Databases
PlanetScale sells managed Postgres: single node from $5 a month, Metal from $50 with local NVMe, high availability as one primary plus two replicas across three zones, online schema deploys and revertable migrations. Railway sells an application platform that happens to run databases: a free tier with a 30-day trial and $5 of credits, then $1 a month; Hobby at $5 minimum usage with $5 of credits included; Pro at $20 minimum usage with $20 of credits included, unlimited workspace seats and up to 10 vCPU and 48GB per service - everything above the included credits is metered per second for CPU and memory, with egress at $0.05 per GB. Choose PlanetScale if the database is a component of a stack you already host elsewhere; choose Railway if you want the app and its database on one platform and will accept usage pricing for that convenience.
PlanetScale sells a database: Postgres single node from $5 a month, Metal from $50 with local NVMe, high availability as one primary plus two replicas across three zones, online schema deploys and revertable migrations. Supabase sells a backend around Postgres: Pro from $25 a month with the first project included, 100,000 monthly active users, 8GB of disk and 250GB of egress before per-unit overages, plus auth, storage, realtime and edge functions, and $10 of compute credits that cover a Micro instance. Choose PlanetScale if you already have an application server and want only the database; choose Supabase if you want the database plus auth, storage and APIs under one bill.
Both sell managed Postgres with branching, and they price it differently. Neon leads with a free plan - 100 projects, 1GB of storage each, 100 CU-hours a month per project and compute that suspends after about five minutes of inactivity - then usage rates: $0.106 per CU-hour and $0.35 per GB-month on Launch (typical spend listed at $15 a month), $0.222 per CU-hour on Scale (typical $701), with SLAs, HIPAA and private networking at the top tier. PlanetScale publishes fixed entry prices instead: Postgres single node from $5 a month for development and low-traffic production, Metal from $50 with local NVMe, and high availability as one primary plus two replicas across three availability zones. Choose Neon if idle-database cost matters and you will pay for what you use; choose PlanetScale if you want a priced node, online schema changes and a published HA configuration.