3 SaaS tools with self-hostable alternatives
Neon is a serverless Postgres platform that separates storage and compute, enabling database branching (creating isolated copies for development and testing), autoscaling to zero when idle, and instant scale-up under load. It targets developers who want Git-like branching workflows for database schema development. The Neon project is itself open source under Apache 2.0.
PlanetScale is a MySQL-compatible database SaaS built on Vitess, offering Git-like schema branching (deploy requests), horizontal sharding, and managed schema migrations without locking. Developed by the team that built Vitess at YouTube. PlanetScale ended its free tier in 2024, which prompted many small teams to evaluate alternatives.
Upstash is a serverless database platform offering Redis-compatible caching, rate limiting, and pub/sub billed per request rather than by reserved instance size, targeting low-traffic and bursty workloads.