Hosting & Infrastructure - Setup Guide

How to set up PlanetScale

Otto's honest, no-fluff walkthrough. Every step here is what we'd actually do if we were sitting at your keyboard. Real gotchas first, real steps second, and a link to the personalized version at the bottom.

Read these before you start

• PlanetScale killed the free Hobby tier in April 2024, giving 60 days notice. Users on free had to migrate or upgrade to Scaler ($39/month). This move drove many hobby users to Neon, Supabase, or Turso [source: planetscale.com/blog/planetscale-forever, community reactions on HN].
• Vitess does not enforce foreign key constraints by default. Foreign key support was added in 2023 but has caveats around cross-shard queries. Apps that rely on database-enforced referential integrity should verify their needs.
• Schema change workflow (deploy requests) is powerful but adds a step: schema changes go through a branch, get reviewed, then deploy. Teams used to running arbitrary ALTER TABLE in production need to adapt.
• Connection pooling: PlanetScale requires connection pooling for serverless deployments (Vercel Functions, Lambda); their PSDB serverless driver handles this.
• No traditional user-manageable database backups you can download in a file; backups are internal, restored via support or point-in-time restore.

The 7-step setup

1. 1

   Create your PlanetScale account

   Sign up at the link below. Card required for the paid tier - most plans include a trial period; check the pricing section on this page first so you know what you're committing to.

   Open PlanetScale signup
2. 2

   Complete the initial onboarding

   Skip the marketing questionnaires when you can. Fill only the fields that actually configure the product - name, timezone, your first workspace or project. If PlanetScale pushes you into a setup wizard, take it - it usually accelerates the first productive session.

3. 3

   Connect your existing tools

   Wire PlanetScale into the rest of your stack. The integrations that most people set up first: Vercel (native), Netlify, Prisma, Drizzle, TypeORM, Django ORM, Rails ActiveRecord, all standard MySQL drivers, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Datadog, Grafana. PSDB serverless driver for edge functions and serverless environments.. Do these before importing data - clean integration first, data second.

4. 4

   Import your existing data (only what you'll actually use)

   Do NOT bulk-import everything. Import the last 30 days of the ONE workflow you're moving over first. Prove it works. Then import more. Big-bang migrations are how PlanetScale deployments die in month 3.

5. 5

   Set up your first real workflow

   Pick the single most-frequent task you'll do in PlanetScale - the daily-driver workflow. Configure it end-to-end. Use it live for a week. Do not touch any other feature yet. Adoption failure comes from teams trying to use everything on day one instead of the one thing that actually pays.

6. 6

   Add your team (if applicable) and set access

   Once your solo workflow works, invite one teammate at a time. Watch them use it. The friction points you missed are the ones they hit. Fix those before scaling to more users. Never invite 20 people at once - you'll get 20 confused people and 0 useful feedback.

7. 7

   Compound with the right pairings

   Recommend PlanetScale for mid-to-large SaaS with MySQL workloads that value schema-change safety and horizontal scale. Recommend Neon or Supabase (both Postgres) when the client is Postgres-first. Recommend RDS or Cloud SQL for enterprise-managed relational databases. Do NOT recommend for solo founders on a tight budget in 2026; the $39/month entry is a real barrier for hobby projects.