How to delete your PlanetScale account

About deleting your PlanetScale account

PlanetScale is a serverless database platform built on Vitess, designed to provide developers with horizontal scaling, branching workflows, and non-blocking schema changes. As a database-as-a-service (DBaaS), it handles highly sensitive application data, including production schemas, query history, and user metadata. Organizations often choose to delete their accounts when migrating to self-hosted infrastructure, transitioning to a different database provider, or concluding a specific project that no longer requires managed Vitess instances.

Deleting your account is a critical security step for offboarding. Reasons to delete your PlanetScale account include:

• Shutting down inactive projects to prevent potential data exposure or configuration drift.
• Consolidating your infrastructure stack away from managed DBaaS providers.
• Complying with internal data sovereignty requirements or changing security protocols that necessitate the total removal of third-party cloud database hosting.

What happens to your data

When you trigger a permanent account deletion in PlanetScale, the system initiates the removal of your organizational data, including all database branches, schema definitions, and stored query statistics. While PlanetScale operates on top of AWS, it does not typically retain access to your deleted application data indefinitely.

Data removed or purged includes:

• Active database branches and production environment configurations.
• Historical schema migration logs and diffs.
• Query performance insights and analysis logs stored within your dashboard.
• Billing details and associated contact metadata linked to your organization.

Note that while PlanetScale removes your specific user-managed data, backups or system-level logs might exist in their cold storage for a limited period due to AWS retention policies or regulatory requirements regarding financial transaction logging.

Privacy considerations

Using a database platform like PlanetScale requires trust in how they handle telemetry and query logs. PlanetScale collects operational data to optimize their Vitess-based engine, which can lead to privacy concerns regarding how 'query plans' or metadata are cached by the platform.

Privacy tips for PlanetScale users:

• Audit your query logs regularly to ensure no PII (Personally Identifiable Information) is inadvertently logged in your query history.
• Rotate your database secrets and service tokens before initiating deletion.
• Use the 'Delete' functionality to ensure that your specific Vitess cluster configurations are scrubbed from their active control plane.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I delete my account if I still have active database branches?

No, PlanetScale requires you to manually delete all organizations and database branches before the account deletion option becomes available.

Does deleting my PlanetScale account stop my billing immediately?

Yes, once the account and associated organizations are deleted, all subscription billing cycles are terminated.

Will my data be recoverable after I delete my account?

No, deleting a PlanetScale account is a permanent, irreversible action that clears all data associated with your user ID and organizations.

Can I export my database before deleting the account?

Yes, you should use the PlanetScale CLI to perform a data dump or use tools like mysqldump to export your data before initiating the account deletion process.

Does PlanetScale keep my credit card info after I delete my account?

Billing information is managed through their payment processor; while your account is deleted, they may retain transaction records for tax and legal compliance.