# Crunchy Bridge vs ScaleGrid

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/compare/crunchy-bridge-vs-scalegrid/

Every value below is read from Crunchy Bridge's and ScaleGrid's own documentation. See https://inetgeek.com/methodology/ for how.

## At a glance

| Criterion | Crunchy Bridge | ScaleGrid |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Pricing model | Billed for the time a cluster is provisioned, prorated to the second, with the monthly figures on the plans page being what a full month costs. Price varies by instance size, region and storage. Three tiers — Hobby, Standard and Memory-optimized — where the tier decides IOPS, whether PgBouncer is included and what support you get, not just the size. | Two models: Dedicated Hosting, an all-inclusive plan covering machine, disk and network cost; or Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC), management-only pricing where the cloud provider is billed separately. |
| Regions | 37 regions across three clouds — 16 on AWS, 14 on Google Cloud, 7 on Azure — counted from the region tables on Crunchy's own plans page, which lists them and publishes no total. | Six cloud providers: AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, Oracle Cloud (OCI) and Akamai. Specific regional availability is not published on the pricing or product pages. |
| Engine | PostgreSQL only. Crunchy Bridge is a single-engine service — there is no MySQL or analytics product beside it in the same offering — and it runs on all three major clouds so the database can sit next to whatever else you already run. | MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ and SQL Server. |
| Backup retention | 10 days, included in the cluster price rather than sold as a tier, and extendable by configuring additional daily, weekly, monthly and yearly backups to keep. | Up to five backups per deployment on ScaleGrid's dedicated hosting plans. |

## Where they differ

### Pricing model

- Crunchy Bridge: Billed for the time a cluster is provisioned, prorated to the second, with the monthly figures on the plans page being what a full month costs. Price varies by instance size, region and storage. Three tiers — Hobby, Standard and Memory-optimized — where the tier decides IOPS, whether PgBouncer is included and what support you get, not just the size. ([source](https://docs.crunchybridge.com/concepts/plans-pricing))
- ScaleGrid: Two models: Dedicated Hosting, an all-inclusive plan covering machine, disk and network cost; or Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC), management-only pricing where the cloud provider is billed separately. ([source](https://scalegrid.io/pricing.html))

### Regions

- Crunchy Bridge: 37 regions across three clouds — 16 on AWS, 14 on Google Cloud, 7 on Azure — counted from the region tables on Crunchy's own plans page, which lists them and publishes no total. ([source](https://docs.crunchybridge.com/concepts/plans-pricing))
- ScaleGrid: Six cloud providers: AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, Oracle Cloud (OCI) and Akamai. Specific regional availability is not published on the pricing or product pages. ([source](https://scalegrid.io/mysql.html))

### Engine

- Crunchy Bridge: PostgreSQL only. Crunchy Bridge is a single-engine service — there is no MySQL or analytics product beside it in the same offering — and it runs on all three major clouds so the database can sit next to whatever else you already run. ([source](https://docs.crunchybridge.com/))
- ScaleGrid: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ and SQL Server. ([source](https://scalegrid.io/pricing.html))

### Backup retention

- Crunchy Bridge: 10 days, included in the cluster price rather than sold as a tier, and extendable by configuring additional daily, weekly, monthly and yearly backups to keep. ([source](https://docs.crunchybridge.com/concepts/backups))
- ScaleGrid: Up to five backups per deployment on ScaleGrid's dedicated hosting plans. ([source](https://scalegrid.io/pricing.html))

## Which should you choose?

Pick Crunchy Bridge if Anyone who wants Postgres and nothing else, from people who work on Postgres. Ten days of per-minute recovery is included in the price of every cluster rather than sold as a tier, and replicas can sit in another region or another cloud.

Pick ScaleGrid if Teams that already have a favored database engine and cloud provider but want someone else operating it — the BYOC model bills infrastructure at cost and adds management on top, worth it if the operational burden is the actual problem.

Consider something else: Crunchy Bridge — You need a free plan to start on, or a second database engine later. This is a single-engine paid service.

Consider something else: ScaleGrid — The workload fits a single-engine specialist with its own scale-to-zero or branching model — ScaleGrid's value is operating an engine you already chose, not offering a distinctive one.

## Documented by only one

- Free tier: ScaleGrid: No
- Entry paid plan: Crunchy Bridge: $9 a month for Hobby-0 — 2 cores, 512 MB, AWS only. Crunchy says the Hobby tier runs on lower-quality infrastructure, has no PgBouncer and is not intended for production; the first production tier is Standard-4 at $70 a month for 1 core and 4 GB. There is no free plan.
- Startup credit program: ScaleGrid: Startup Saver: up to 50% discount on ScaleGrid hosting for 12 months.
- Managed connection pooling: Crunchy Bridge: Supported
- Database branching: Crunchy Bridge: Limited — a new cluster restored from backup, to any minute in 10 days
- Point-in-time recovery: Crunchy Bridge: Any minute inside the 10 days of retained backups. The WAL is streamed every 60 seconds or 16 MB, whichever comes first, and a restore produces a fork of the cluster rather than replacing it.
- Read replicas: Crunchy Bridge: Supported

## Questions this comparison answers

**Should I choose Crunchy Bridge or ScaleGrid?**

Pick Crunchy Bridge if Anyone who wants Postgres and nothing else, from people who work on Postgres. Ten days of per-minute recovery is included in the price of every cluster rather than sold as a tier, and replicas can sit in another region or another cloud.
Pick ScaleGrid if Teams that already have a favored database engine and cloud provider but want someone else operating it — the BYOC model bills infrastructure at cost and adds management on top, worth it if the operational burden is the actual problem.