Thanks for the support Prime, I'm glad to call you a friend. I'll be ok, excited to figure out what's next!

@ThePrimeTimeagen

3 ай бұрын

genuine about it to!

@asim-tahir

3 ай бұрын

o7

@andrewmcodes

3 ай бұрын

we love you Aaron

@aarondfrancis

3 ай бұрын

@@andrewmcodes 🥹 love you too man

@raditzfarhan

3 ай бұрын

It's their loss Aaron. You've been great! Keep educating and excited to see what you'd do next!

I feel so bad for Aaron. I only subbed to their KZread for him. He was really good at explaining concepts and had a good mentor personality. I hope he continues his KZread presence after this layoff. I’m honestly more inclined to not use their service for just axing that one product ambassador.

@murtadha96

3 ай бұрын

Wait... they axed Aaron?! that is such a dumb move to be honest

@DomskiPlays

3 ай бұрын

NOOOO not Aaron!! His videos made me like Planetscale so much more

@jitx2797

3 ай бұрын

No way😢... I really liked his content..very easy

@nandagopal.05

3 ай бұрын

They just fired their best ambassador 😢

Aaron Francis was even building a studio to make better videos for PlanetScale. And now? Someone will have to pay for it. I wish Aaron Francis all the best for the future. Love that guy 👍

@Cassp0nk

3 ай бұрын

His videos were great. Can’t believe they ditched him.

@JohnRoux

3 ай бұрын

Such an amazing dude!

@edhahaz

3 ай бұрын

​@@Cassp0nk He was a 5000x marketer, unbelievable.

@gauravaws20

3 ай бұрын

absolutely. i was bummed when I saw his update on twitter.

@shoooozzzz

3 ай бұрын

AF was the best part about Planet Scale

A hosted DB seems like a crazy business model. Your target is users with low traffic or not-so critical data, and you don't offer enough on top of just DB. What Supabase is doing seems good.

@jay.rhoden

3 ай бұрын

Yes, and furthermore, your target customer are small organizations that don't know how to spin up a VPS with a database and/or don't have the ability and/or resources to look after their database. Planet Scale is filling this legitimate gap, but its a low profit high maintenance and high churn category of customer.

@thekwoka4707

3 ай бұрын

@@jay.rhoden It could go to larger and larger, if they introduce easy handling of more and more advanced dbfeatures. Like postgres sharding is still a nightmare, and something that makes it much easier to safely and maintainably shard a postgres instance would be valuable even to companies that can afford and manage their own DBs.

@paulie-g

3 ай бұрын

@@jay.rhodenIf you think the difficulty in hosting a database on a VPS < $39 is 'spinning it up', you have a clue deficit

@GamingMasher

3 ай бұрын

If it's your sole business model yes it's a bit crazy, though for AWS/GCP/Azure I think it makes sense. I bet RDS makes a killing...

Ben’s tweet summarizes my feelings perfectly

@SandraWantsCoke

3 ай бұрын

We need an update video on Databases. Railway, PlanetScale are no longer free. There''s a new Vercel thing, Neon or something like that. A 2024 update would be cool and now is a good time to make this update. Turso also.

They should've renamed to PlanetProfitability

@YunisRajab

3 ай бұрын

ProfitScale

@jamesp1389

3 ай бұрын

Planet💩

@pcodes

3 ай бұрын

or PaidPlanet 😂😂😂😂

did not expect to wake up and see my tweet in a prime video lol, great vid agree with pretty much everything

Aaron Francis got laid off as part of this btw Also wonder if the delay in support for vector dbs is indicative of the tech issues

@ThePrimeTimeagen

3 ай бұрын

i believe i mention him by name in this, or on the outside of this video (during the live stream) he is a good friend of mine and he is one of the best

@ea_naseer

3 ай бұрын

​@@ThePrimeTimeagenhe taught me some nuggets about SQL he's really good at SQL.

@yarrichar

3 ай бұрын

@@ThePrimeTimeagen You do, but not the getting laid off part. Not trying to speak out of turn, I was just very surprised to see that news.

@spicynoodle7419

3 ай бұрын

Ah, that sucks. Aaron was the reason I heard about PlanetScale and to me he was the face of the company. He made really great content. Aaron will be missed

@yoyoclockEbay

3 ай бұрын

RIP Aaron

The free tier was very generous, it wouldn't have surprised me if they cut it in half but to fully remove it is honestly kind of wild. RIP in peace to my planetscale hobby projects

@deidyomega

3 ай бұрын

Yeah, they should have just reduced the capacity to 1/10th the current amount

@adlex1212

3 ай бұрын

I don't get why anyone would use planetscale for hobby projects. Why not manage your own databases?

@deidyomega

3 ай бұрын

@@adlex1212 Manage them how? Throw a docker on your desktop? In America, a lot of ISPs block common web ports, so your app can't live on your home network. So you need some sort of server infra. I mean a super cheap aws ec2 would suit most projects just fine. But who wants to remember to update your servers.

@BrentMalice

3 ай бұрын

idk how and am lazy. do you have anymore questions@@adlex1212

@Kane0123

3 ай бұрын

Or a couple bucks? 0 to 39 is hard for a hobby project, 0 to 5 or 10 - no problem for me

Honestly, the fact that you use GIMP instead of ExcaliDraw gives off such Chad energy. Man, I don't know what entertainment I'd be consuming if you weren't streaming. You use Linux, a tiling WM, NeoVim and do fun stuff with non-javascript languages - truly a rare breed.

@XDarkGreyX

3 ай бұрын

Uhm, he does use Excalidraw occassionally... ?

@mrkinetic

3 ай бұрын

Only in collabs with @t3dotgg ;)

@DeanRTaylor

3 ай бұрын

Teej

Can't wait to hear Theo's take on this, he always used to shill hard for the PlanetScale's free tier lmao

@mrkinetic

3 ай бұрын

Yeah now I feel kinda bad for passing that advice along to other people getting started.

@earthling_parth

3 ай бұрын

Theo is and awesome guy but many of these predictions and recommendations he keeps on making have a tendency of ending up this way according to what I see.

@q1joe

3 ай бұрын

I think he’s sponsored by them…

@rodjenihm

3 ай бұрын

@@q1joeYes but that might change soon. As PlanetScale focus shifts towards B2B there is no more need to sponsor social media influencers to promote it.

@mrkinetic

3 ай бұрын

I think the moral of the story is to not lean so much on these platform as a service tools. Nobody starting out is going to run into scaling issues running a MySQL or Postgres database on a $5/month linode.

Layouts are a failure of management because people have shifted their lives to work for you, and suddenly you realized that either your plan failed or you didn't even have a plan, so you screw over your employees.

@winfredj9820

3 ай бұрын

lol no

@jamesnewman9547

3 ай бұрын

@@winfredj9820 lmfao yes

Almost every startup priorities growing as fast as possible at all cost, and then figures out how to make money. Its insane, but its how they work

@monad_tcp

3 ай бұрын

Its also how 1/12 of them work, the rest dies.

I went to their pricing page. You get 0.2vCpu 1GB Ram 10GB storage for $39/month. This is about 40 times the cost you can get with any VPS!!! Forty times!!! Why would you not host your own DB? The learning curve is steep, but after that it's flying, with better hardware, even lower costs for each new project.

@chris-pee

3 ай бұрын

That's surprising, especially comparing to what is I think the closest thing - Neon. Equivalent plan is $19/month, and branching and serverless support is similar. That said, I still gave up on them after recent significant pricing changes.

@SandraWantsCoke

3 ай бұрын

@@chris-pee Turso, Cloudflare's D1, CockroachDB, Neon, Supabase still have free tiers. Never tried them since I roll my own DBs. But those 40 bucks is just steep. They should've at least provided a better hardware, I mean like 4GB Ram and 2vCore. It's very easy to host your own DB on the cheapest VPS. It's literally just running a few commands and voila, you have a DB. Yes, you have to solve taking backups yourself, but it's all doable. And for $40 you could have much better hardware, like 100-200x times more storage, 48GB RAM, 10 Cores. Yes, two hundred times more storage. You could probably host a country wide online shop and be fine with that hardware!

Profitability or sustainibility? As a CEO, do you want a new Ferrari right now or a new BMW every 3 years forever?

@TheTeddie

3 ай бұрын

What you just said is way more profound than most will ever realize

@YTDeletes90PercentOfMyComments

3 ай бұрын

Think of the poor billionaries that dont even have a second superyacht

@thekwoka4707

3 ай бұрын

Well, they can prioritize profitability NOW because it's not sustainable. They don't say focussing on profitability forever. But that it is a major priority right now.

@dorferino

3 ай бұрын

If you hop companies you can have a ferrari every 3 years.

@monad_tcp

3 ай бұрын

I thought sustainibility just meant ESG scores, making ugly products for the Schwab family because we live now in feudalism, you won't own anything.

Spicy takes from tech Bill Burr today

2:28 but that is the whole plan, make it free, let everyone build their system on top of you and when there are a lot of people depending on you, just increase the price. All your customers will cry, but they will pay.

We had some layoffs this year and the leaders stood there and told us besides this we are doing things right. I straight up asked the ceo if we are needing to lay people off because we aren’t making money how does he still have a job. He stood there and told us all we didn’t mess up, though we layed off 30%, removed all shares and were absorbed back into our parent company lol.

Planetscale is hard sell b2b when there is RDS, Aurora, etc, especially without internal champions who have used it before (free tier)

Growth is the business model for startups. Grow as fast as you can, corner the market, IPO before profitability so all the investors can make bank and get out before it all collapses.

@complexity5545

3 ай бұрын

This is how you know the Industry is dense and over-burdened with phony career programmers, admins, and geeks. Even IPOs know its bloated. That is like the skeleton boilerplate plan for scam artists.

Good takes. Liked the info on Turso too. Gives me more confidence in them

i love your take and your stance. and i love that you stand your ground on your opinions.

Aaron Francis is a gift, his talks are prized, his ethos is a treasure. I only know about PlanetScale because of Aaron.

You can prioritize value added. It’s a proven model behind the success of companies like Toyota and Valve, and (obviously) still creates profitable companies. It’s also the model Harvard Business School emphasizes.

with time, I stopped thinking your voice sounds goofy but I do remember thinking that initially

Imagine vercel removing hobby plan. Yup. It's same

Never thought I would see the primeagen reacting to a Ben Davis tweet. He is most definitely going to make a video about it for sure. Absolutely right that I don't see how planetscale scales out to new users without having a free tier for new users to play around with that lead to conversations in companies to actually use their system, especially when there are existing managed databases that exists that you can use and try out.

From 2:30-3:00, Prime was trying to discuss the difference between selling a commodity or consumer good and renting a capital good. The capital good is the server because it aids in creating commodities or services.

Totally agree with Prime's take on layoffs being a failure of leadership. The people calling L take have no clue. All these massive layoffs came from massive overhiring during pandemic when a lot of companies were souring in revenue - everything was growing but it was unsustainable and it only got worse when inflation went through the roof. Overhiring wasn't the only issue, but it was a big issue made worse with inflation and increased costs. The writing was on the wall since end of 2020 for anyone that was looking at the trends

I did not expect Prime to be this animated or upset about it!

ah yeah baby. back again.

Such a spicy Prime first thing in the morning 🤣 love the hot takes man

0:28 a company can be a cooperative and prioritise some other value. Usually increasing profitability will still be a key metric in increasing the primary value.

Oh man this was actually pretty good timing for me as I have time to move to another service (thinking Turso, btw) before I get my first customer :)

flip is working really quick

This was so calculated imo. Get tech tubers to shill the free tier, lock people in by abstracting features away (like foreign keys), rug the free tier and leave devs in the dust

I don't get why people get emotionally attached to these services, it is businesses that are providing said services and businesses like making money, be a discerning consumer and go where it is cheapest and best for fucks sake. There is not an ounce of consumer loyalty in my heart, if I feel there is a service that is better, I will migrate and drop you in a second.

@chris-pee

3 ай бұрын

Yeah, imagine spending your time on shilling a company for free.

@AbegazNap

3 ай бұрын

@@chris-pee exactly

Glad that I decided to go with a good old local database for my recent project

6:19 my dawg keepin' real, why he my #1 dev creator.

@cg219

3 ай бұрын

I said the same thing lmaoooooooo

"Adjective cursing is room temp IQ" I'm dumb as f***, checks out.

@connorskudlarek8598

3 ай бұрын

(it's a pun, for anyone who's gonna act like this is Twitter)

Great take PrimeAgen your judgement is getting better

Anybody remember Heroku? Lets be real, devs use the tools they know.

Rug pull. Agree 100%

I watched PlanetScale ads for years. Finally decided to jump on the ship last December - my ride didn't last long.

Sustainability is the most important part on any business

They should have just left it very small amount or very small price version. I am not going to pay $25/month to see the viability of my hobby project which may take few years to build out.

@spicynoodle7419

3 ай бұрын

Just pay 1/3 of that by self-hosting everything and for the love of hell, don't self-host on AWS

@zactamzhermin1434

3 ай бұрын

@@spicynoodle7419 just curious why? most expensive?

@spicynoodle7419

3 ай бұрын

@@zactamzhermin1434 it's the most expensive and if your side project takes off, you will be stuck with AWS due to the stupendous egress fees. Once you AWS, there's no going back

Free tier is good sales funnel. Maybe some just need more reasonable limits. Like not "make 1 billion databases for free for your pokemon smash or pass apps" but something. Like maybe a maximum total limit across all your free instances

Would be nice to see Theo's reaction to this especially since he just covered PlanetScale's Schema Recommedations.

Wooo yeah baby!! That’s what I’ve been waiting for!!! That’s what it’s all about Wooo!!

"I've tired to be agnostic in the DB I prefer" Also prime "BRAZIL MENTIONED!" JK love your content 🎉

I think it's an important distinction between "right sizing" a department and deciding to leave an industry. Layoffs are 100% a reflection on leadership, leaving an industry is potentially a reflection on leadership, but not always.

Completely agree with your stance around layoffs. Edit: also, this whole growth mindset over sustainability is why the tech industry is shitting the bed all over the place

“Growth only makes sense if you are profitable.” - Tell that to Jeff Bezos 😅

Grow and then profitability (extract value) is exactly what the VCs ask them to do

Ironically an animation show, Castlevania, is the only thing ive watched on Netflix since the cuties fiasco. And no, I didn't pay for netflix, i borrowed an account for a week.

What were you prioritizing before? lol good stuff

Stop relying on vendor locking software, use open source that you can easily move from your vendor when you want to...

I JUST STARTED YESTERDAY BECAUSE THEO TOLD ME TO DAMN YOU THEO

The life cycle of a software company: first they are for the people, then they are for the customer, next they are for the profit and then they are for the shareholders... Finally the shareholders sell them out down the river for a price they like.

Nothing is more true than free enterprise users becoming paid enterprise users. Catering for free devs is like Media companies investing in content. Long-term profitability always beat short-term one.

Why did Netflix de-invest animation, I thought that it was really popular?

moving my planetscale bookmark into the heroku folder :(

Subconsciously drew the LUA logo

6:08 The name of that is Reserve army of labour. is not "weak leadership" or anything, is just to pressure the dev salary down. Now you have 15.000 dev looking for a job that will be willing to accept way less than before, because if they didn't there are 14.999 that will.

Thumbs up for sticking it to chat. Say what you think, say what your real world business experience is. Internet has too many n00bs w/no real world experience.

Based on their statement, the most likely reason is that their convertions is not high enough. They are getting a ton of new free tier users, but not enough of them are converting to paid customers, which means for each new free tier user their profitability goes down. I think they have identified that they have enough new paying customers coming in at the moment, and still will have even without free tier continuing, that they can stop marketing efforts like the free tier and rather focus on providing features that people are willing to pay for, so they can increase the dollars extracted per paying customer per month.

6:18 BLAZINGLY BASED

This is time for Supabase to shine.

The only problem with Turso is you have a lower storage limit.

Layoffs isn't bad leadership. Many times its a conscious choice to risk growth over sustainability. Lots of companies don't care about their employees; they are only resources/tools to be used so its just business as usual if they have to layoff or hire in droves.

@1:58 that is literally what Amazon did. It took them nine years to make a profit while, during that time, entraining the public to use their site to hone their consumer skills.

Looks like they killed not just the "hobby" but also the $30/m "scaler" tier, the only things left are "pro" which is "starting at $40/m" and "enterprise" that doesn't have a quoted price.

Also definitely not using turso , it had accidently removed some db of free tier people plus supabase/pocketbase/drizzle are genuinely cool. Neon also feels awesome , But personally am not that sure about it so supabase :)

Layoffs should really only be considered failure in management if management is also laid off. If management keeps their job, then this is a machine working as designed

Supabase or pocketbase (personally I am inclined towards planetscale so that just in case if it ever needs more scalibility than pocketbase can offer then I would have the ability to ) plus it has a free tier

You should ask open source users if getting something for free always makes someone happy 😂

So happy i'm into self hosting. I pay 80 for a hetzner server and host all this myself. I don't use anything that doesn't have an open source alternative. As much as I can.

Investors could have staved off the pressure to be immediately profitable in order for them to develop sufficient maturity to enter the market in a profitable way. Infrastructure as a service is something where I could see it requiring extra maturity

The thing to me about big layoffs these days is companies knew about them, for weeks, months ect. Workers often find out the day of, and have their life ruined. Executives wonder why company loyalty is down and then turn around and show inhuman levels of care for the effects their layoffs have.

They are classically confusing Users with Customers. Its not the same thing and taking away free entirely does not convert them.

Interest rates are up, venture capitalists have cut funding. Free was never free.

Ok maybe I will look into turso as you say prime.

@Serizon_

3 ай бұрын

Or maybe not , I will see supabase first.

I can agree so much with publicly traded companies being terrible , that's why personally I like the idea of bootstrapped software especially in dev space. Just a guy writing code :) , Prime I never resonated so much as now with your videos.

It's common nowadays that companies, especially in the IT space, work in an unprofitable manner for years to drive widespread adoption and grow a user base (leading to scam companies and crappy management in a lot of cases, of course). The market was rewarding this behavior quite generously, right until the recession scare, where it switched to rewarding free cash flow / profit.

Totally different business, but this reminds me of Evernote. Back in the days, its CEO Phil Libin motto was something like "I'm building Evernote as the company that will last a hundred years". In reality, company just lost focus on its key product features and went downhill. It is still there, but honestly, it's shrinking each year. So now, whenever I hear something similar (forever / to last 100 years) - I'm like "Nope".

Twitch chat is hilariously delusional in this video

@spicynoodle7419

3 ай бұрын

As usual

I wonder if just charging 1$ a month for the free tier would drastically cut most of the non-serious businesses and/or limiting the resources you get for free rather than deleting it entirely

We might lose money on every customer, but we make it up on volume.

One thing to consider in this discussion of profitability is that unfortunately supporting a large load of free users can hinder building your platform that it does continue to get better. I have seen other companies make this decision. Youre spending alot of resources and time and not getting anything in return. This can oftern hurt the experience of those companies who are paying you large sums of money. This should be better thought out by leadership.

I think it is pretty hard to write an article worse than this that impacts your customers this much. IMO, 100% a failure in leadership when you have to change your strategy this much mid stream. Just feels like this is symptomatic of all the worst parts of the SV VC scene where everyone tries to blitzscale until a down round when reality sets in and then all of a sudden you have to make a new company as it seems is the case here. A good founder should not be tempted into growing so fast if he also doesn't have a solid grip on what his operating costs are and when your company is in the storage game, you better have some insane deals worked out with the clouds and some long term strategy in place as everyone knows, storage aint compute, or memory, it sticks around a while and the clouds charge absurd rates for it.... They should have known this was going to be happen and if they did, people should call it what it is, a giant rug pull which is pretty messed up when you are talking about people's data.

@YTDeletes90PercentOfMyComments

3 ай бұрын

good founders dont make startups.

Companies prioritizing growth over profitability is how every startup foes it. If you're not big enough to create an island to isolate you from competiton then there will be a bigger and more capital rich organization that will see what you're doing and saturate the market you wanted to go in. Growth is not as appealing now because of the cost of credit going up, but almost all tech gigants we see today are where they are because they focused on growth and dominated their market. Now they can make their stockholders very happy because they can reap the profits without being contested.

prioritizing customers doesn't mean to give things for free, it means the product you are making will save them pain or any other resources, so the point is they will save more that what your product cost by buying from you. entrepreneurship is about aligning interests of people in the market so they redirect resources towards you away from the inefficient options.

So the path to being profitable is to not get popular so your growth curve doesn't become more exponential than your profit curve 😂

Twitch chat will argue against anything 😂

would love to see aaron francis joining the boot dev roster!

So basically it's more cost effective to use AWS services and scale out less efficiently than to use PlanetScale. Also have to worry about what future "in the name of profits" decisions they're going to make before you sign up because they don't have a viable business plan. Got it.

Planetscale is not a shower, it's a grower

glad to hear turso not going to delete free tier for long days

Always felt like it was a bit disingenuous when people talk about how much money they're saving using some of these serverless offerings. Good engineering is when your infra is cheap because your code and architecture is well designed, good engineering isn't having a company purposefully eating the cost of your app in order to grow their evaluation. The planetscale situation is especially bad because it's hard to move your apps data

@invinciblemode

3 ай бұрын

Still cheaper than hiring engineers to self host.

@paulie-g

3 ай бұрын

@@invinciblemode.. and who writes the code, the tea lady?

@ericng8807

3 ай бұрын

@@invinciblemodethat is true, I'm a bit bias because I've done a decent amount of devops. But also I feel like people make it seem alot scarier than it actually is? People affected by the planetscale situation were free tier users. I'd imagine their apps may not need a distributed database. Their are a decent amount of founders who have gotten very far with even just a sqlite database

Imagine if Cloudflare made the same move.