It's not every day you get to launch a hosted Postgres service that has something fundamentally new to offer. That's what we have done with Prisma Postgres, and I'm incredibly excited for it.
We are using Firecracker and unikernals to deliver true scale-to-zero without cold-starts. Happy to go into more detail if anyone is interested.
Wow, I thought you guys were just reselling Neon like some others. This is genuinely impressive technically. It's got me looking at Unikraft Cloud for other stuff too.
That said, do you plan do offer branching or any other features that Neon offer? I think that's their big selling point along with separate billing for compute and storage.
Prisma team member here... Yes, when we go GA, we'll offer features that'll give you the comfort of wanting to run your production loads on Prisma Postgres!
Essentially, you pay for database queries and events, with 60'000 included for free, which is plenty for experimenting and small projects. Price per million queries/events is then based on the plan you're subscribed to, and with Starter you have zero monthly fixed costs and only pay for queries and events above 60'000.
No CPU-time and similar that's usually hard to grok.
Take a look at the Accelerate and Pulse pricing details. Prisma Postgres comes bundled with these, so the pay-as-you-go pricing is the same: https://www.prisma.io/pricing#accelerate
We'll continue to make improvements to the pricing on the way to General Availability to make it both as easy to understand and affordable as possible.
Congrats on the launch, this looks very interesting!
Will it ever be possible to self-host Prisma Postgres (or Pulse)? It's great that I can use your platform, but if I adopted e.g. Pulse, that's a non-trivial vendor lock in. I'd feel _much_ safer/confident building my app around the Prisma stack (besides the ORM, which I like).
Self-hosting for Prisma Postgres, Pulse, and Accelerate isn’t currently on the agenda. Our focus is on building Prisma into a company that gives developers the best tools for working with data. We handle a lot of the underlying complexity, abstracting it away to make the developer experience seamless so that teams can concentrate on building their applications rather than worrying about infrastructure—just as we do with databases and the Prisma ORM.
Your point about concerns around vendor lock-in is completely valid, and we get it. However, we're confident that our approach with the ORM, along with the trust we’ve built with the community, will set the stage for us to develop long-term commercial products that are fit for serious, production-ready deployments.
Just to give you a bit more context, I've been evaluating CDC (change data capture) tooling and Prisma Pulse was one of the options. My primary data storage is Postgres but I have a need to react when data in some tables is changed (depending on some user-provided filters). I'm currently handling that with naive message push to SQS, because Debezium/Kafka setup is too expensive/complex. Prisma Pulse looks great, but that CDC part of my app is crucial and I need an option to be able to host it myself/on premises for some customers.
However I totally understand the need to build a moat — good luck on your journey!
I recall Prism as a player in the GraphQL server field, this was about 8 years ago.
Anyone knows what happened to that? According to their website they now offer only Postgres services?
It's not every day you get to launch a hosted Postgres service that has something fundamentally new to offer. That's what we have done with Prisma Postgres, and I'm incredibly excited for it.
We are using Firecracker and unikernals to deliver true scale-to-zero without cold-starts. Happy to go into more detail if anyone is interested.
Wow, I thought you guys were just reselling Neon like some others. This is genuinely impressive technically. It's got me looking at Unikraft Cloud for other stuff too.
That said, do you plan do offer branching or any other features that Neon offer? I think that's their big selling point along with separate billing for compute and storage.
Prisma team member here... Yes, when we go GA, we'll offer features that'll give you the comfort of wanting to run your production loads on Prisma Postgres!
Congrats on the launch!
I’m a bit confused about the pricing.
The docs and pricing pages on your website don’t seem to outline how the pay-as-you-go pricing will work.
Is this still being figured out?
Essentially, you pay for database queries and events, with 60'000 included for free, which is plenty for experimenting and small projects. Price per million queries/events is then based on the plan you're subscribed to, and with Starter you have zero monthly fixed costs and only pay for queries and events above 60'000. No CPU-time and similar that's usually hard to grok.
Take a look at the Accelerate and Pulse pricing details. Prisma Postgres comes bundled with these, so the pay-as-you-go pricing is the same: https://www.prisma.io/pricing#accelerate
We'll continue to make improvements to the pricing on the way to General Availability to make it both as easy to understand and affordable as possible.
Congrats on the launch, this looks very interesting!
Will it ever be possible to self-host Prisma Postgres (or Pulse)? It's great that I can use your platform, but if I adopted e.g. Pulse, that's a non-trivial vendor lock in. I'd feel _much_ safer/confident building my app around the Prisma stack (besides the ORM, which I like).
Self-hosting for Prisma Postgres, Pulse, and Accelerate isn’t currently on the agenda. Our focus is on building Prisma into a company that gives developers the best tools for working with data. We handle a lot of the underlying complexity, abstracting it away to make the developer experience seamless so that teams can concentrate on building their applications rather than worrying about infrastructure—just as we do with databases and the Prisma ORM.
Your point about concerns around vendor lock-in is completely valid, and we get it. However, we're confident that our approach with the ORM, along with the trust we’ve built with the community, will set the stage for us to develop long-term commercial products that are fit for serious, production-ready deployments.
Thanks for clarification, that makes sense.
Just to give you a bit more context, I've been evaluating CDC (change data capture) tooling and Prisma Pulse was one of the options. My primary data storage is Postgres but I have a need to react when data in some tables is changed (depending on some user-provided filters). I'm currently handling that with naive message push to SQS, because Debezium/Kafka setup is too expensive/complex. Prisma Pulse looks great, but that CDC part of my app is crucial and I need an option to be able to host it myself/on premises for some customers.
However I totally understand the need to build a moat — good luck on your journey!
> because Debezium/Kafka setup is too expensive/complex
Totally get that. Many of our users like Pulse because of that.
> I need an option to be able to host it myself/on premises for some customers.
Completely understand the need and thanks for the wishes!