CockroachDB Cloud

DB 6.4/10 Jun 16, 2026

Cockroach Labs' managed distributed SQL database with a forever-free Basic tier that scales to zero and is Postgres wire-compatible.

Free credit: $400
Card required: No

CockroachDB Cloud scores 6.4/10 for free value in DB. The main constraint: 50 million Request Units (RUs) and 10 GiB storage free per month on the Basic plan; scales to zero; no credit card required for Basic. ($400 in trial credits also available separately.).

Category DB Kind Distributed SQL (Postgres-compatible) serverless database Caveats Free allowance is consumption-based (RUs); heavy/sustained workloads can exhaust the monthly RU budget. Single free database per org context. Renewal monthly Card required No Eligibility anyone

Free value score

6.4 / 10

Show the math

Overall 6.4/10

value = 6.4/100

weighted_components_v1

Capacity 6.2/10

value = 400 $ one-time

fixed_log_v1

Operations 5.4/10

value = 5.4/100

policy_score_v1

Production fit 8.3/10

value = 8.3/100

policy_score_v1

Key metrics

10 GB Storage

1 reads/mo Reads policy_default: Conservative scoring fallback: no comparable monthly read allowance is published in this item.

1 writes/mo Writes policy_default: Conservative scoring fallback: no comparable monthly write allowance is published in this item.

n/a Egress no published free egress cap

0 hr/mo Compute RU-metered, no hour cap

1 DB Databases

What you get

50M RUs + 10 GiB storage free every month

Postgres wire-protocol compatible

Scales to zero, 99.99% uptime target

No credit card required for Basic plan

Gotchas

50M Request Units/month

Each calendar month the free allowance resets to 50 million Request Units; heavy or sustained workloads can exhaust this budget before month end.
10 GiB storage/month free

Only the first 10 GiB of storage is included free each month; data beyond that is billed at on-demand rates.
30K RU/sec burst cap

The Basic plan is capped at approximately 30,000 Request Units per second (~60 vCPUs), making it unsuitable for high-throughput production workloads.
Scales to zero when idle

Basic clusters scale compute down to zero when idle and incur a cold-start latency on the first connection after a period of inactivity.
No private connectivity

PrivateLink and Private Service Connect are not available on the Basic plan; all connections go over the public internet.
No metrics/log export

Export of metrics and logs to observability platforms such as Datadog, Splunk, or New Relic requires the Standard or Advanced plan.
No enterprise security controls

CMEK, LDAP, row-level security, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA compliance features are restricted to the Advanced tier.
No enterprise changefeeds

Enterprise change data capture (changefeeds for Kafka, webhooks, etc.) is not available on the Basic plan.
Single free cluster per org

The free Basic allowance applies to one database cluster per organization context; additional clusters incur on-demand charges.
AWS and GCP only (no Azure)

Basic clusters can only be deployed on AWS and GCP; Azure support is exclusively available on the Advanced plan.

sql postgres-compatible serverless distributed scale-to-zero

Open service Source ← All DB

Alternatives

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