PlanetScale vs Spider Cloud

PlanetScale solves data storage and scale: managed Postgres plus Vitess, the MySQL-compatible sharding system, on locally-attached NVMe with unlimited IOPS, one primary and two replicas across three availability zones with automated failover, PgBouncer pooling on port 6432, read replicas, automated backups, Database Traffic Control query budgets, and Query Insights. Its signature workflow is branch-per-environment with deploy requests and online schema changes with revert — safe, reversible migrations. Recent releases extend this: Neki, its sharded Postgres, now supports extension management by name in Terraform and the pscale CLI, Vitess gets per-shard VTTablet sizing, and external MySQL databases can be attached as Vitess keyspaces without importing data. Spider Cloud solves data acquisition: one POST renders a page (scripts run, lazy images load, infinite scroll completes) into markdown, JSON, HTML, or text; crawls whole sites with pages streaming back as JSONL; offers a web search endpoint returning SERP results plus scraped pages and AI extraction in one call; and runs full browser sessions with anti-detection and CAPTCHA solving. The unblocker handles bot walls and geo checks with retries, backed by a 215M+ residential/ISP proxy network across 199 countries. Both expose an MCP server, and both let you script operations, but the overlap ends there — PlanetScale manages your persistence layer; Spider Cloud pulls the outside web into your pipeline, with a new provider router object routing requests to outside providers on your own keys.

Both are freemium, but the meters measure completely different things. PlanetScale charges for a managed database — compute and storage for Postgres or Vitess, with a 99.99% single-region SLA and 99.999% multi-region on Enterprise. It's sold through self-serve and AWS/GCP Marketplaces, so real cost scales with cluster size, replicas, and regions rather than request count; there's no per-request meter to game. Spider Cloud charges per request on pay-as-you-go, or flat-rate on Unlimited, where concurrency is effectively unlimited and high-volume crawls beat metered billing — with two important caveats from the current data: geo-targeting isn't available on Unlimited (so geo-fenced crawls stay on pay-as-you-go), and residential/ISP proxy pools and AI extraction bill separately from base request pricing. Its own published alternatives research compares cost at 100,000 pages, which is the right unit for that product. Because the units differ — cluster hours versus pages fetched — a line-item price comparison is meaningless. Budget on intended use: PlanetScale is an infrastructure line item that grows with data and traffic served; Spider Cloud is a data-acquisition line item that grows with pages and browser sessions consumed.