When a spreadsheet won't cut the mustard
Presented by:
Richard Crowley
Richard is an engineer, engineering leader, and recovering manager. His work focuses on cloud infrastructure, tooling, databases, and distributed systems. He is an engineer at PlanetScale. Prior to joining PlanetScale he founded a consulting practice called Source & Binary and led operations engineering at Slack. He tolerates computers, likes bicycles, isn't a very good open-source maintainer, and lives in San Francisco with his wife and two kids.
No video of the event yet, sorry!
Spreadsheets are everywhere, from shoestring budgets and vacation itineraries to complex models driving global financial markets. Spreadsheets are there when your typical startup sets its prices, too. It starts out simple - a list of things you sell and how much you charge. Inevitably you'll add additional paid features, separate fixed and variable costs, expand to other countries or currencies, and so on. Two mentions become twenty. Your spreadsheet is overwhelmed. Postgres is there for you.
This talk is the story of trying and failing to stuff all the facets of a complex pricing model into a spreadsheet and the triumph of reimagining it as a Postgres database. We'll discuss the data model, how it's realized in a Postgres schema, the Postgres features that make it possible, the additional tools we developed to create this database, and how the company uses it to make informed decisions about pricing and margins.
The lessons learned and patterns used here to tackle pricing apply to any domain that's grown beyond the two-dimensional confines of a spreadsheet.
- Date:
- Duration:
- 20 min
- Room:
- Conference:
- Postgres Conference: 2026
- Language:
- Track:
- Essentials
- Difficulty:
- Easy