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TiDB Cloud Starter

DB 5.7/10 Jun 16, 2026

PingCAP's TiDB Cloud Starter is a MySQL-compatible distributed SQL database with both row and columnar storage and a large always-free monthly allowance.

Card required
No

TiDB Cloud Starter scores 5.7/10 for free value in DB. The main constraint: 25 GiB row storage + 25 GiB column storage + 250M Request Units free per month per organization; pay-as-you-go beyond that ($0.20/GiB, $0.10/1M RUs).

Category DB Kind Distributed HTAP SQL (MySQL-compatible) serverless database Caveats Consumption-based RU model; free quota is per-organization, not per-database. Vector/AI features tie to the same RU budget. Renewal monthly Card required No Eligibility anyone

Free value score

5.7 / 10
Show the math
Overall 5.7/10
value = 5.7/100
weighted_components_v1
Capacity 4.8/10
value = 7.75 $/mo
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

25 GB Storage
250M reads/mo Reads
1 writes/mo Writes policy_default: Conservative scoring fallback: no comparable monthly write allowance is published in this item.
Metered via Egress no separate cap
0 hr/mo Compute scales to zero
5 DB Databases

What you get

25 GiB row + 25 GiB column storage free monthly

250M Request Units free per month

MySQL-compatible, auto-scaling, scale-to-zero

Row + columnar storage for HTAP/analytics

Gotchas

  • 250M Request Units/month free

    Each organization gets 250 million Request Units free per calendar month; resets monthly with pay-as-you-go billing beyond that at $0.10/1M RUs.

  • 25 GiB row storage free/month

    Up to 25 GiB of row (TiKV) storage is included free per organization per month; additional storage billed at $0.20/GiB.

  • 25 GiB column storage free/month

    Up to 25 GiB of columnar (TiFlash) storage is included free per organization per month, shared with the row-storage billing model.

  • Free quota per organization, not per DB

    The 25 GiB + 25 GiB + 250M RU allowance is shared across all Starter clusters in the organization, so multiple projects compete for the same pool.

  • Scales to zero when idle

    TiDB Cloud Starter scales down to zero compute when idle, causing cold-start latency on first request after inactivity.

  • No point-in-time backup / HA

    Starter tier lacks point-in-time backup, 30-day retention, and multi-zone 99.99% availability — those features require EssentialPreview or higher.

  • AWS and Alibaba Cloud only

    Starter clusters are available on AWS and Alibaba Cloud only; GCP and Azure are not supported on this tier.

  • Vector/AI features share RU budget

    Vector search and AI features consume the same 250M RU monthly quota, reducing the effective allowance for mixed workloads.

  • Shared serverless resources

    Starter runs on shared, autoscaling serverless infrastructure — throughput is not guaranteed and may be lower than dedicated tiers under concurrent load.

Sources

mysql-compatible sql serverless htap vector-search
Open service Source ← All DB

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