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Paid plans start at $400/mo. There's also a free plan.
TiDB Cloud Starter costs $0 per month and includes set storage and Request Unit allowances. TiDB is also open source and available for self-managed deployment, but your infrastructure costs are separate. For managed production use, Essential starts at $400 per month and Premium at $1,800. TiDB Cloud Lake uses hourly compute pricing, storage charges and cloud-service fees. No annual billing is listed, so estimate the bill from workload, region and configuration rather than treating a starting price as a total.
01Every plan, line by line
| Plan | Billed annually | Billed monthly | Built for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | — | $0 | Developers building on-demand applications |
| Essential | — | $400 | Growing applications needing capacity control |
| Premium | — | $1,800 | Business-critical applications needing isolation |
| Dedicated | — | $1,376 | Applications needing configurable cloud clusters |
| Personal | — | Quote | Developers starting with analytics and search |
| Business | — | Quote | Teams needing private connectivity and retention |
| Dedicated | — | Quote | Workloads needing isolated custom resources |
Add-ons and overages
- Starter usage beyond the free allowance: from $0.10/million RUs, $0.20/GiB-month row storage, and $0.05/GiB-month columnar storage.
- Essential and Premium storage, backups, data transfer, and other services cost extra; prices vary by region, configuration, and usage.
- Dedicated pricing varies by cloud provider, region, cluster configuration, and additional services.
- Lake storage and cloud services are billed separately; listed rates are $23/TB-month and vary by tier for API requests.
- Lake compute is billed by the second while running; storage and applicable charges continue when suspended.
- Data integration services incur additional charges.
- BYOC adds TiDB Cloud service and support fees; the cloud provider bills infrastructure.
02What the plan grid doesn't tell you
Starter overages
Beyond the free allowance, row storage starts at $0.20/GiB-month, columnar storage at $0.05/GiB-month and usage at $0.10 per million RUs.
Production add-ons
Essential and Premium charge extra for storage, backups, data transfer and other services; prices vary by region, configuration and usage.
Lake usage
Lake adds $23/TB-month storage and cloud-service charges. Compute is billed by the second while running; suspended workloads still incur storage and applicable charges.
Infrastructure and services
Data integration costs extra. BYOC adds TiDB Cloud service and support fees, while the cloud provider bills infrastructure.
03Which plan should you buy?
| If you are… | Get | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Prototype or small application | Starter | The $0 tier includes monthly storage and Request Unit allowances across up to five eligible instances. |
| Production team needing controls | Essential | Compute starts at $400/month and includes autoscaling within a limit and point-in-time recovery; other services cost extra. |
| Analytics and search developer | Personal | TiDB Cloud Lake Personal lists warehouse compute from $1.60/hour, plus storage and cloud-service charges. |
04Is TiDB worth the money?
TiDB Cloud Starter is a practical place to develop or run a modest application if its allowances fit. For production, the listed starting prices are only part of the bill: storage, backups, transfer and usage can add costs, and Lake is billed separately. Paying for Essential or Premium can make sense when their compute controls, recovery, isolation or availability features match your needs. Self-managed TiDB may suit teams that need infrastructure control, but compare operating costs and confirm the license before assuming it is cheaper.
TiDB pricing FAQ
What does TiDB Cloud Starter include for free?
Starter is $0 per month and includes 25 GiB of row storage, 25 GiB of columnar storage and 250 million Request Units monthly. The allowance covers up to five eligible instances. Additional usage is billed at the listed overage rates.
How much does TiDB Cloud cost for production?
Essential compute starts at $400 per month and Premium at $1,800 per month. Storage, backups, data transfer and other services cost extra, with prices varying by region, configuration and usage. Dedicated clusters start at $1,376 per month.
How is TiDB Cloud Lake billed?
Personal warehouse compute starts at $1.60 per hour and Business at $2.40 per hour. Storage is listed at $23 per TB-month, and cloud services cost $1 or $2 per 10,000 API requests, respectively. Compute is billed by the second while running.
Is self-managed TiDB free to run?
TiDB is described as open source and available for deployment on your own infrastructure, but the cloud pricing page does not give a self-hosting price. Budget for your infrastructure and operations, and confirm the software license in the repository before deployment.