Case Study: WhyDonate cuts database costs 8× moving from Google CloudSQL to PlanetScale
Key results
The challenge
WhyDonate, an online fundraising platform, ran on Google Cloud SQL, where its small development team found database management demanding. Schema migrations were time-consuming and error-prone — one botched migration took 80 hours to fix — and performance issues affected the platform's SEO rankings. The database work diverted the lean team away from building product features.
The solution
WhyDonate switched from Google Cloud SQL to PlanetScale, a serverless MySQL platform that integrated with its Cloudflare Workers infrastructure. PlanetScale's branching and revertible schema changes let the whole team make database changes safely without dedicated DevOps staff.
“The ability to revert a schema change has been a huge boost in confidence for our team. It's ended our migration anxiety.”
NCNeils CorverCo-Founder & Managing Director, WhyDonate
The results, in context
WhyDonate reports that moving from Google CloudSQL to PlanetScale delivered an 8× cost reduction and put an end to its database downtime. The team also saved more than 80 work hours previously lost to database DevOps and reduced overall feature-development time by about 10%.