TiDB Pricing: Plans & Cost Calculator 2026
Unlike typical cloud databases, TiDB scales from a free tier up to $1800/mo, offering a cheaper MySQL-compatible alternative to CockroachDB.
TiDB plans and pricing
TiDB Cloud Starter
Variable workloads, dev/testing
TiDB Cloud Dedicated
Predictable traffic, advanced requirements
TiDB Cloud Essential
Production, autoscaling compute
TiDB pricing: the quick answer
TiDB Cloud starts free as of July 8, 2026. The Starter tier gives each organization 25 GiB of row storage, 25 GiB of column storage, and 250 million Request Units a month at no cost, then meters at $0.20 per additional GiB and $0.10 per additional 1 million Request Units. Essential (preview) adds autoscaling compute; Premium (preview) starts at $1,800 per month for mission-critical scale; Dedicated runs from $0.22 per hour on provisioned nodes. TiDB is MySQL-compatible, so the free tier is a real way to test horizontal scaling without sharding, and the jump to Premium is where the number gets serious.
- TiDB Cloud StarterFree
- TiDB Cloud Dedicated$0.22/vCPU/hr
- TiDB Cloud Premium$1800/mo
- TiDB Cloud EssentialCustom
At $0.22/mo to start, TiDB sits 94% below the $3.50/mo median across 10 databases tools we track.
TiDB cost calculator
TiDB Hidden Costs & Pitfalls
The Starter free allotment is generous, and the costs to plan for are what happens when you cross it and where the paid tiers actually begin.
TiDB pricing, read against its live plans and category
Positioning
TiDB Cloud has a genuinely generous free tier and a steep climb above it. Starter is free with 25 GiB row storage, 25 GiB column storage, and 250 million Request Units a month per organization, scales to zero, and needs no card. It is full MySQL-compatible TiDB, which makes it a real way to test horizontal scaling without MySQL sharding. The paid path runs through Essential (preview, autoscaling compute), Dedicated at $0.22/hr on provisioned nodes, and Premium at $1,800/mo for mission-critical scale.
Cost drivers
- 1Starter overage. Past the free allotment, storage bills at $0.20/GiB and Request Units at $0.10 per 1 million, so a query-heavy app quietly leaves the free tier.
- 2The Premium jump. Premium starts at $1,800/mo, a hard floor, so the move off Starter to mission-critical scale is a large discrete step, not a gradual ramp.
- 3Preview status. Essential and Premium are in preview, so pricing and availability can shift under you.
Watch-outs
The two things to watch are Request-Unit consumption on the metered tiers and the infrastructure appetite of a distributed database.
Strengths
- HTAP removes the need for a separate analytics warehouse in many cases
- MySQL compatibility cuts migration effort
- Strong horizontal scaling for high-write workloads
Editor’s take
Teams hitting MySQL sharding limits should use the free Starter tier to prove out horizontal scaling, then move to Dedicated or Premium once traffic is real. For a standard relational workload, the Premium floor is overkill; plain MySQL is free as Community Edition and far simpler to run.
Oleh KemFounder & Lead AnalystTiDB price history
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Frequently asked questions
Sources & verification
| Source | What was checked | Last checked |
|---|---|---|
| Official Pricing Page | Source of verified tiers | July 8, 2026 |
| Official Website | Official vendor website | — |
| G2 | G2 verified user reviews · 4.6/5 · 67 reviews | — |
| PeerSpot | PeerSpot enterprise peer reviews | — |
Every fact on this TiDB pricing page is tied to a named source and a verification date. Freshness-sensitive figures trace to the sources above; verify against the vendor before relying on them.
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