PlanetScale

PlanetScale operates a cloud database platform with three offerings: Vitess (sharded MySQL), Neki (sharded Postgres), and managed Postgres, and publishes an MCP server for controlled AI agent access to databases. The focus is on horizontal scalability, performance through NVMe-backed infrastructure, and schema changes without downtime.

According to the company, NVMe drives deliver effectively unlimited IOPS, and PlanetScale is marketed as the fastest cloud Postgres in benchmark comparisons. For reliability, it offers 99.999% SLAs for multi-region and 99.99% for single-region deployments. Developer-friendly features include branching for isolated development environments, connection pooling, and Query Insights monitoring for analyzing slow queries. Security certifications include SOC 2 Type 2+ with HIPAA compliance and PCI DSS Level 1.

Through the MCP server, AI agents get what the company calls "safe access" to databases — for example, to optimize queries without uncontrolled changes to production data.

The business model is tiered: PlanetScale Postgres starts at $5 per month, the Metal tier at $50, also available through the AWS and GCP marketplaces, with a "bring your own cloud" option for enterprise customers. The company was founded in 2018 by Jiten Vaidya and Sugu Sougoumarane, co-creators of Vitess, which was originally built at YouTube in 2010 to make MySQL work at that platform's massive scale.