Best-in-class cloud cost maturity driven by the engineering team

About PlanetScale

PlanetScale is a cloud-based MySQL database platform built on Vitess, the technology that scaled YouTube. Trusted by companies like Block and Intercom, PlanetScale delivers high performance via locally attached NVMe-backed drives, reliability, and developer-friendly workflows, making it ideal for applications that demand both speed and scalability. Features like non-blocking schema changes, database branching, and horizontal sharding to support effortless scale without compromising developer speed.

The Cloud Cost Challenge at PlanetScale

As an infrastructure-as-a-service company, PlanetScale handles a significant amount of cloud infrastructure across multiple environments. With high volumes of usage and spend data, accurately allocating cloud costs was becoming a time-consuming, manual process. Monthly reporting on margins, COGS, and R&D was largely ad hoc - driven by engineers manually pulling data and building reports from scratch. This made answering questions from finance difficult to scale. It also limited the granularity and reliability of the cost data used to inform strategic decisions about customers and product development.

Doing all our cost reporting manually was taking too much time and wasn't sustainable. Every month felt like starting from scratch. Nick Van Wiggeren, CTO, PlanetScale

Solving With Vantage

PlanetScale adopted Vantage to centralize its cloud cost data and create a shared source of truth between engineering and finance. 

By ingesting cost and usage data into Vantage, engineering teams could now build consistent, accurate reports and dashboards that finance could access self-serve, without relying on one-off Slack threads or custom SQL queries. Vantage’s integration with tools like Terraform and Kubernetes made it easy to incorporate into PlanetScale’s existing workflows without requiring major changes to how the team operates.

Vantage just works the way we work. With Terraform, Kubernetes, and all the tools we already use. It fits right into our stack, which made adoption easy. Nick Van Wiggeren, CTO, PlanetScale

Terraform for FinOps as Code

The team had a hard requirement that the FinOps tool not disrupt or slow down the engineering team. Anything that forced engineers to manage complex config in unfamiliar UI’s was a non-starter.

The Vantage Terraform provider was exactly what they needed. The engineering team can define all of their tagging, allocation, reports, and alerts in code. This lets the team collaborate on changes using their familiar GitHub workflow.

Granular Kubernetes Cost Metrics With the Vantage Agent

PlanetScale runs massive Kubernetes clusters, and high-level external metrics on their cost and efficiency would not have been actionable. They added the secure and lightweight Vantage Kubernetes Agent running inside their pods to extract more detailed and granular metrics.

These detailed Kubernetes cost metrics give them the ability to understand and make decisions on efficiency by product, customer, and more.

Building a durable cloud business with Vantage

At this point, we run part of the business from the data that we generate in Vantage. And that was just not the case before, and it was not to the level of specificity that it needed.Nick Van Wiggeren, CTO, PlanetScale

With Vantage, PlanetScale uses cost data to guide business decisions. The company can:

• Evaluate product and customer margins with far greater precision.
• Justify or adjust investments based on real-time, segmented cost data.
• Track development and operational costs tied to specific features or SKUs.
• Reduce the engineering overhead required to support finance with cost insights.

Engineering and finance now collaborate through shared dashboards built in Vantage. These reports are used in regular screen shares and serve as a baseline for planning, forecasting, and ongoing business reviews. Because Vantage integrates cleanly with PlanetScale’s infrastructure tooling, the platform is extensible, allowing for continued refinement and expansion of reporting capabilities.

What’s Next

PlanetScale is continuing to invest in making its systems more observable to Vantage. New engineering roadmap items include tagging resources and improving data granularity to support more detailed, SKU-level, and per-customer margin analysis. The goal is to make data-driven decisions faster and more confidently. And, ultimately, build a more durable business that continues to scale profitably.