CockroachDB vs PlanetScale Pricing (2026)
How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.
| CockroachDB | PlanetScale | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | Custom | Custom |
| Number of plans | 3 | 2 |
| Free plan | — | |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Pricing model | usage-based | usage-based |
Basic
Standard
Popular- Provisioned compute with
Advanced
Base Plan
- Single node — Starting at $5/month for development and low-traffic workloads
- Metal — Starting at $50/month with local NVMe storage for high-performance needs
- High Availability — 1 primary + 2 replicas across 3 availability zones
- MySQL-compatible databases with horizontal sharding (Vitess)
- Instance and VTGate sizes
- Storage amount — First 10 GB included, and then $0.50 per GB per instance
- Add-ons — Additional development branch hours, SSO, upgraded support
Enterprise
- Bring your own cloud
- Upgraded support
- Database expertise
- Migration assistance
- Slack-based support
- More deployment options
- Business support included
- Architecture consultation
- Custom pricing
- Additional regions
CockroachDB vs PlanetScale FAQ
- Which one is cheaper?
- One or both use custom pricing, so it depends on your specific needs.
- Can I use either one for free?
- CockroachDB has a free plan. PlanetScale doesn't — you'll need to pay from day one.
- How do they charge?
- Both use a usage-based model, so the comparison is straightforward — it comes down to features and limits at each price point.
- Which one is a better deal?
- Depends on what you need. CockroachDB: At $0.18/hr for 2 vCPUs, they're positioning competitively against managed Postgres alternatives like AlloyDB or Aurora, but the distributed SQL angle means they're really gunning for teams that have outgrown single-region databases — not the cheapest option, but cheaper than building multi-region resilience yourself. PlanetScale: They're threading the needle between managed Postgres commodities (Neon, Supabase) and premium database-as-a-service players (Aurora, AlloyDB) — not the cheapest option, but positioning on performance and MySQL/Postgres flexibility for teams that have outgrown basic managed DBs. The AWS and GCP Marketplace availability signals they're going after cloud-native teams with existing marketplace spend commitments.
Still deciding? See the best CockroachDB alternatives or the best PlanetScale alternatives, ranked with verified pricing.
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