PlanetScale vs Postmark
Serverless MySQL (Vitess) and Postgres at scale
vs. Reliable transactional email with fast delivery
Pricing tiers
PlanetScale
Postgres EBS single-node — PS-5
Single-node EBS, 512 MiB RAM, arm64. Entry point for Postgres.
$5/mo
Postgres EBS HA — PS-5
3-node (primary + 2 replicas), 512 MiB, arm64.
$15/mo
Vitess (non-Metal) — PS-10
Vitess MySQL sharded cluster, 1 GiB RAM.
$39/mo
Postgres Metal — M-10
3-node Metal, 1 GiB RAM + 10 GiB local storage. Much higher IOPS.
$50/mo
Vitess Metal — M-160
Vitess Metal, 16 GiB RAM + 110 GiB storage.
$609/mo
Enterprise
Custom agreements, dedicated regions, 99.99% SLA.
Custom
Postmark
Free
100 emails/month forever. No credit card. Side projects and testing.
Free
Basic — 10k
10,000 emails/month. Overage $1.80/1k. Unlimited emails/day.
$15/mo
Pro — 10k
10,000 emails/month. Overage $1.30/1k. Inbound email + message streams.
$17/mo
Platform — 10k
10,000 emails/month. Overage $1.20/1k. Team collab, more domains.
$18/mo
Enterprise (>1.5M)
Custom for senders exceeding 1.5M/month.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing pg-ebs-nonha-starter on PlanetScale vs free on Postmark.
| Metric | PlanetScale | Postmark |
|---|---|---|
| ha | 0 nodes | — |
| ram mib | 512 MiB | — |
Features
PlanetScale · 12 features
- Backups — Automated daily backups with retention.
- Database Branching — Git-like branches of your DB schema (not data). Create, diff, merge via deploy r…
- Deploy Requests — Schema changes in a feature branch get reviewed + auto-applied to main with zero…
- HIPAA — HIPAA-compliant deployments (Enterprise).
- Metal (NVMe) — Dedicated NVMe local storage. 10x IOPS vs EBS, latency-critical workloads.
- PgBouncer Pooler — Managed PgBouncer for Postgres clusters. Optional dedicated pooler.
- PlanetScale Boost — Query result cache with sub-ms reads.
- Point-in-Time Recovery — Restore cluster to any point within retention window.
- Postgres on PlanetScale — PostgreSQL 15+ with the same branching + deploy-request flow. Launched 2024.
- Query Insights — Per-query performance analytics, slow query tracking, explain plans.
- Read-only Regions — Route reads to the nearest region for lower latency.
- Vitess (MySQL at scale) — Horizontally-sharded MySQL (YouTube-scale) — original PlanetScale offering.
Postmark · 12 features
- Activity Search — Full-text search over sent messages for 45-365 days.
- Bounce Handling — Automatic hard/soft bounce detection + suppression management.
- Broadcast Messages — Via separate Broadcast Message Stream. Bulk sends with throttling.
- DKIM + SPF — One-click verification + auto-renewal of DKIM keys.
- Inbound Email — Route inbound emails to your webhook. Parse attachments, threads.
- Message Streams — Isolate transactional from marketing for separate deliverability reputation.
- Open + Click Tracking — Configurable at template or send level.
- Raw API Access — 100+ endpoints for bounces, servers, tags, templates, stats.
- Servers — Multi-tenant isolation: each "server" has its own API token + reputation.
- Templates — Mustachio template language with variables, alias + versioning.
- Transactional Send — Reliable API for password resets, receipts, notifications. Sub-10s delivery.
- Webhook Events — Delivery, bounce, spam complaint, open, click, subscription change.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | PlanetScale | Postmark |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | PlanetScale CLI (pscale) | — |
| SDK | @planetscale/database | postmark-dotnet, postmarker (Python), postmark-go, postmark (Node), postmark-php, postmark-rails |
| REST | Management API | Postmark REST API |
| MCP | PlanetScale MCP | — |
| OTHER | MySQL Wire Protocol, Postgres Wire Protocol | Inbound Email, SMTP Relay, Webhooks |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to PlanetScale and Postmark are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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