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Paid plans start at $400/mo. There's also a free plan.
TiDB Cloud starts at $0/month with Starter, which includes 25 GiB each of row and columnar storage plus 250M monthly Request Units shared across up to five eligible instances. Paid compute starts at $400/month on Essential and $1,800/month on Premium; Dedicated clusters start at $1,376/month. Lake compute starts at $1.60/hour, with separate storage and service charges. Starter has usage overages, annual prices aren't listed, and self-managed pricing is not published in these details.
01Every plan, line by line
| Plan | Billed annually | Billed monthly | Built for |
|---|---|---|---|
| TiDB Cloud Starter | — | $0 | Developers building on-demand applications |
| TiDB Cloud Essential | — | $400 | Growing apps needing capacity control |
| TiDB Cloud Premium | — | $1,800 | Business-critical apps with changing demand |
| TiDB Cloud Dedicated | — | $1,376 | Apps needing configurable cloud clusters |
| TiDB Cloud BYOC | — | Quote | Teams keeping data in their cloud account |
| TiDB Cloud Lake Personal | — | Quote | Developers starting with analytics and search |
| TiDB Cloud Lake Business | — | Quote | Teams needing private connectivity and retention |
| TiDB Cloud Lake Dedicated | — | Quote | Workloads needing isolated custom resources |
Add-ons and overages
- Starter usage beyond allowance: from $0.10/million Request Units, $0.20/GiB-month row storage, and $0.05/GiB-month columnar storage; rates vary by provider and region.
- Essential and Premium storage, backup, data transfer, and other services are billed separately.
- Lake storage and cloud services are billed separately; data integration services incur additional charges.
02What the plan grid doesn't tell you
Starter overages
Starter includes 250M monthly Request Units and 25 GiB each of row and columnar storage; overage rates vary by provider and region.
Storage and backups
Essential and Premium prices are compute floors. Storage, backups, data transfer, and other services are billed separately.
Lake add-on charges
Lake compute is hourly, billed by the second while running; storage is $23/TB-month, with separate cloud-service and data-integration charges.
BYOC infrastructure bill
BYOC infrastructure is billed by your cloud provider, in addition to TiDB Cloud service and support fees.
03Which plan should you buy?
| If you are… | Get | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Developers building on-demand apps | TiDB Cloud Starter | It costs $0/month and includes storage and Request Unit allowances for up to five eligible instances. |
| Growing apps needing capacity control | TiDB Cloud Essential | Compute starts at $400/month, with autoscaling within your compute limit; storage and other charges are extra. |
| Analytics and search developers | TiDB Cloud Lake Personal | Warehouse compute starts at $1.60/hour, with storage at $23/TB-month and cloud services billed separately. |
04Is TiDB worth the money?
TiDB can make sense if you need distributed SQL for transactional, analytical, or AI workloads, and want managed cloud or self-managed deployment options. The price grid is less straightforward than its starting prices suggest: paid compute has a floor, while storage, backups, transfer, and Lake services can add charges. The published details don't give like-for-like prices against other databases, and self-managed pricing is not published here. Model your expected usage before switching.
TiDB pricing FAQ
Is TiDB HTAP?
TiDB is described as an open-source distributed SQL database for transactional, analytical, and AI workloads. That fits a hybrid transactional and analytical use case, but the published material does not state an HTAP certification or give workload-specific limits.
How much does database hosting cost with TiDB?
TiDB Cloud Starter is $0/month. Essential compute starts at $400/month, Premium at $1,800/month, and Dedicated clusters at $1,376/month. Lake compute starts at $1.60/hour. Storage and some services cost extra; self-managed pricing is not published on the vendor's site.
Does TiDB support triggers?
The published product and pricing information does not say whether TiDB supports triggers. Its distributed SQL and ACID transaction features do not answer that question. Check TiDB's current documentation or confirm with the vendor before relying on triggers in a migration.
Is TiDB a Chinese company?
The published material does not identify the company's nationality or ownership, so we can't confirm that. It describes TiDB as an open-source database and links to PingCAP, but those details alone don't establish company nationality. Check company disclosures for a definitive answer.