How These Database Platforms Will Fuck Your Budget

Why MongoDB Atlas Is Financial Cancer for Startups

MongoDB Atlas pricing is designed by sociopaths. Seriously. I spent 3 months thinking I was paying ~$60/month for an M10. Actual average bill? $180/month. Here's how they fuck you:

The Index Bloat Scam: MongoDB creates indexes automatically. They don't tell you this shit adds 20-40% storage overhead. My 8GB dataset became 12GB overnight because of indexes I didn't even know existed. M10 → M20 upgrade: **$115/month**. Support response? "Working as designed, dickhead." (Paraphrasing)

The Peak Usage Trap: They bill for your highest usage during the month. Traffic spike for 2 hours? You pay M30 rates ($250) for 30 days. This is capitalism distilled into pure malice.

Performance Advisor = Expense Generator: This tool suggests indexes like a dealer offers free samples. Every "performance optimization" costs 10-20% more storage. I ignored half their suggestions and saved $50/month. Some queries run 100ms slower. Who gives a shit?

What actually happened: Started on M10 thinking I was being smart. Then data grew. Then indexes multiplied like fucking cancer. First I tried upgrading to M30 thinking it was a performance issue. Spent an hour thinking it was a connection pooling problem. Support suggested "optimizing queries" which helped exactly zero.

Then Product Hunt hit and Atlas auto-scaled me into bankruptcy. Took me two months to notice I was still paying M30 rates because I'm an idiot. Oh, and backups cost extra because of course they do.

Should've spent maybe $300-400 total. Actual damage? Somewhere north of $900. Atlas works great if daddy's VC firm is paying. If you're bootstrapping, good luck sleeping at night.

PlanetScale: Premium MySQL for People with Actual Budgets

PlanetScale murdered their free tier in March 2024. Absolute fucking betrayal of the developer community. Went from "try us for free!" to "$39/month minimum" overnight. Pure venture capital greed.

But here's the thing that pisses me off: it's actually worth the money.

Every PS-10 instance ($39/month) runs a 3-node Vitess cluster. While Atlas charges you extra for replica sets and backup, PlanetScale includes high availability by default. You get automatic failover that actually works, not like the half-broken shit MongoDB offers.

Storage costs will murder your budget: $1.50/GB total. 100GB database = $150/month JUST FOR STORAGE, plus your base plan. Never figured out why PlanetScale storage costs $1.50/GB when AWS charges like $0.10. Probably because of the 3x replication but their marketing doesn't explain the math.

Did the math once: 50GB app cost $114/month ($39 base + $75 storage) vs $250+ on Atlas for equivalent reliability.

Database branching is fucking magic. Zero-downtime schema changes saved my ass when I had to add indexes to a production table with 10M rows. On regular MySQL? 3AM maintenance window, sweating over potential data corruption. PlanetScale? Merge branch, done.

The catch: You need VC money or customers actually paying you. Bootstrap developers can get fucked, apparently. Classic SaaS move: free tier to build addiction, then paywall once you're hooked.

Supabase: The One That Doesn't Hate Poor Developers

Supabase is the only one that doesn't make me want to quit programming and become a farmer. While Atlas and PlanetScale focus on bleeding you dry for one database, Supabase gives you the whole fucking backend stack: PostgreSQL + auth + real-time + file storage + edge functions.

Free tier that actually works: 500MB database, 50k MAU. I ran a B2B SaaS to 5k users and $2k MRR on the free tier. Try doing that on Atlas without getting bankrupted.

Pro plan reality check: $25/month base, then you need compute credits. Micro instance ($10/month in credits) handles way more than you'd expect. So really $35/month gets you production-ready everything.

But here's why I love these fuckers: spend caps that actually work. Set $50/month limit, hit it, service pauses gracefully. No surprise $800 bills. No "oops we auto-scaled your database during a traffic spike" bullshit. Just civilized behavior from a company that remembers what it's like to bootstrap.

My actual production costs:

• Pro: $25/month
• Small compute: $40/month (4GB ARM, handles 15k DAU)
• Storage overage: maybe $3-5/month
• Total: ~$70/month for what costs $300+ elsewhere

The magic: Usage-based billing that scales DOWN during low traffic. Atlas and PlanetScale charge you for peak capacity 24/7. Supabase says "you only had 100 users today? Here's a $2 bill." Revolutionary concept, apparently.

The One Trap They All Use to Fuck You

Data transfer costs. Nobody mentions this upfront because it's pure profit margin for them.

Atlas hits you with full AWS egress charges (~$0.12/GB). PlanetScale includes transfer in their higher plans, but PS-10 users get screwed. Supabase gives you 250GB free then $0.09/GB.

One Product Hunt launch cost me like $200-300 in transfer fees I had zero idea were coming. API-heavy app with image uploads? You're fucked on all three platforms, just different amounts of fucked.

Listen up bootstrap founders: Budget 2-3x whatever their calculators say. Every single one of these platforms has designed their pricing to maximize the gap between "estimated cost" and "actual bill." It's not an accident - it's the business model.

Atlas Index Hell: 6 Hours of Weekend Debugging

Performance Advisor is basically a drug dealer for indexes. "Your query is slow? Try this compound index! Also these 3 other indexes! Performance guaranteed!"

Took the bait. Added 8 indexes in one week chasing performance. Storage bloated from 8GB to 14GB. M10 → M20 automatic upgrade. Sunday morning: $115/month bill instead of $57.

The Index Purge Weekend:

Spent most of a Saturday deleting indexes like some sort of database janitor. Some were obviously stupid - had compound indexes when single field indexes already existed. Others... no fucking clue what they did.

Deleted something called user.profile.preferences.theme because how important could theme preferences be? Site immediately broke. Turns out some aggregation pipeline I wrote six months ago depends on it. Added it back. Deleted a different one and the dashboard got slower but whatever, users haven't noticed.

Final result: Storage dropped from like 14GB to maybe 9GB, back to M10. Some random queries are probably slower now. Don't know which ones. Don't really care as long as nothing's on fire. Spent 3 hours thinking the connection pooling was broken because Atlas kept dropping connections. Turns out it was just their shared M0 instance being garbage during peak hours.

Atlas damage control tactics that sometimes work:

• Online Archive for old data - $0.0025/GB vs $0.15/GB. Takes 3 hours to set up, works maybe 70% of the time
• Turn off auto-scaling, handle traffic spikes with degraded performance instead of $200 surprise bills
• Set billing alerts at 50% because their 90% alerts arrive AFTER you've been charged
• Connection pooling prevents hitting connection limits that force upgrades (learned this one the hard way during a demo crash)

M0 sandbox reality: Works for development until it doesn't. Randomly crashes during load testing. Perfect for impressing investors until the moment it shits itself during your demo.

Also factor in the tooling costs - MongoDB Compass is free but crashes constantly. TablePlus costs $89 but actually works. Atlas Compass is pretty but crashes if you look at it wrong. MongoDB Shell is fine until you need to format JSON output, then it's fucking useless. Ended up using TablePlus like everyone else.

PlanetScale: Expensive But Not Actively Evil

PlanetScale costs 3x more than reasonable, but at least their Query Insights actually helps instead of trying to bankrupt you. Shows slow queries, suggests optimizations that DON'T require adding 50 indexes.

The schema migration that saved my ass: Had to add a new column to a 10M row table. Regular MySQL = maintenance window at 3AM, praying the migration doesn't lock the table and kill the site.

PlanetScale: Create branch → Run migration → Test everything → Merge branch. Zero downtime. Zero prayer required.

Took maybe 30 minutes total. AWS RDS would've required scheduling downtime, creating read replicas, failing over, probably would've taken all weekend and definitely would've broken something.

The storage cost will kill you slowly: $1.50/GB total, but it's 3x replicated across regions with backups included. Did the math - 100GB database costs $150/month JUST for storage. That's before compute costs.

Random cost optimization discoveries:

• Branches share storage until you diverge schemas (not obvious from docs)
• Connection pooling actually works without configuration hell
• Data import/export is free, unlike Atlas egress charges
• Storage auto-scales without triggering plan upgrades

Still expensive as fuck, but predictably expensive. No "surprise, your index bloat triggered an upgrade" bullshit.

Supabase: Why I Don't Hate This One

Supabase spend caps are the only ones that work like you'd expect. Set $50/month limit, hit it, service pauses gracefully with a reasonable message. No $800 surprise bills, no auto-scaling to the moon.

Free tier truth: 500MB database sounds tiny until you realize most side projects never hit it. Built a task management app to 3k users, used maybe 200MB. The 50k MAU limit is generous - Atlas free tier dies at like 500 connections.

Production scaling weirdness: Micro compute ($10/month) handled 10k DAU with zero issues. Upgraded to Small ($40/month) when I hit 15k DAU, mostly out of paranoia. Could've probably stayed on Micro for months longer.

Random discoveries that saved money:

• ARM instances are actually faster AND cheaper than x86 for most Node.js workloads (didn't expect that)
• Connection pooling through Supavisor prevents connection limit hell automatically
• Usage dashboard shows ACTUAL resource consumption, not Atlas-style "estimated billing units" bullshit
• Edge Functions scale from 0 to whatever without configuration

The one expensive gotcha: PITR backups cost $100/month. Seems steep until your database gets corrupted and you realize backups are cheaper than unemployment.

Still don't understand why their free tier works so well when everyone else's is designed to fail.

The Dumb Experiment That Burned Money

I'm an idiot so I ran the same app on all three platforms for like 3 months. E-commerce thing, maybe 50k users, database was probably 30GB or something. Also tried migrating from Atlas to Supabase during this. Export worked fine. Import script failed 6 times because of some timestamp format bullshit. Ended up writing a custom migration script that took longer than just rebuilding the dataset.

Here's the disaster:

MongoDB Atlas: Bill kept changing every month. Sometimes $200, sometimes $300+. Auto-scaling kept fucking with me. Backups cost extra which I didn't know. Data transfer fees appeared out of nowhere. Had to pay for support when shit broke because free support is useless.

PlanetScale: At least this one was predictable. PS-20 plus storage, came out to like $100-ish every month. Data transfer included which was nice.

Supabase: Pro plan plus compute, ended up around $100/month too. But this included auth and real-time and all the other crap I'd have to pay extra for elsewhere.

The real kicker: Supabase included auth + real-time + file storage that would've cost me probably $150-200/month extra on Firebase Auth + Pusher + S3. Apples to apples, Supabase saved like $200+/month in additional services I didn't have to buy.

Lesson: Atlas is for people with money to burn. PlanetScale is for people with money to burn but want predictable burns. Supabase is for everyone else.

What I Actually Use Now

After burning through way too much money learning this shit: Supabase for everything new. I've moved 3 production apps from Atlas to Supabase. Bills went from like $200/month each to maybe $70/month each. Zero functionality lost, gained auth and real-time features I was paying extra for.

I run this on a 2021 MacBook Pro with 32GB RAM because 16GB wasn't enough for local MongoDB + Docker + VS Code + Chrome with 47 tabs open because I'm apparently incapable of closing anything. PlanetScale CLI breaks on Windows PowerShell because of some UTF-8 encoding bullshit, works fine on Mac. Atlas Compass crashes randomly on M1 Macs for no reason.

Still have one Atlas project running because migration would take forever and it's not worth my time. Every month that $180 Atlas bill reminds me why I hate vendor lock-in.

Bottom line: Don't pick based on features. Pick based on which one won't bankrupt you while you're trying to build something people actually want.