Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Sometimes a service with a free plan will decide to stop supporting it. I understand why this happens, but I'm often disappointed at the treatment of existing user's data. It's easy to imagine users forgetting about their old accounts, missing the relevant emails and then discovering too late that their data is gone.

Inspired by today's news about PlanetScale PostgreSQL I signed into PlanetScale and found I had a long-forgotten trial account there with a three-year-old database on their free tier. That free tier was retired in March 2024.

Here's the screen that greeted me in their control panel:

Database is sleeping PlanetScale has retired the free plan. Please upgrade your plan or you may wake this database for 24 hours to retrieve your data. Two buttons: Wake for 24 hours and Delete database

What a great way to handle retiring a free plan! My data is still there, and I have the option to spin up a database for 24 hours to help get it back out again.

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