# Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale: dropping the free tier was a great decision Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/scaling-devtools/sam-lambert-ceo-of-planetscale-dropping-the-free-tier-was-a-great-decision Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/scaling-devtools/sam-lambert-ceo-of-planetscale-dropping-the-free-tier-was-a-great-decision.md Podcast: [Scaling DevTools](https://stenobird.com/podcast/scaling-devtools) Published: 2025-07-31T15:39:20+00:00 Episode link: https://podcast.scalingdevtools.com/episodes/sam-lambert-ceo-of-planetscale-dropping-the-free-tier-was-a-great-decision Audio file: https://media.transistor.fm/598762db/dbce5f38.mp3 Processing state: failed JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/scaling-devtools/episodes/sam-lambert-ceo-of-planetscale-dropping-the-free-tier-was-a-great-decision Duration seconds: 2582 ## Resource Sam Lambert is the CEO of PlanetScale - a cloud database provider. Sam shares: - Why dropping the free tier was one of PlanetScale's best decisions. But is not for every startup. - People solving serious problems appreciate serious content and if you can create meaningful content, that's a big advantage. - CEOs should be transparent and collaborative but assertive. Don't let your company die while enacting someone else's decision - Express hard-to-convey-benefits via your customers’ experiences This episode is brought to you by WorkOS . If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Links: - Sam's Twitter - Sam's LinkedIn - PlanetScale - PlanetScale Postgres - Caching blog post - Ted Nyman - Snowflake - Vitess ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/scaling-devtools/episodes/sam-lambert-ceo-of-planetscale-dropping-the-free-tier-was-a-great-decision/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/scaling-devtools/sam-lambert-ceo-of-planetscale-dropping-the-free-tier-was-a-great-decision.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.