CockroachDB Pricing in 2026
Plans, hidden costs, and alternatives compared
Is CockroachDB worth the price?
CockroachDB offers one of the most compelling free tiers in the database market — 50M Request Units and 10 GiB storage per month with scale-to-zero is enough to run a real production app at low traffic for free.
The serverless Basic plan is the standout: you pay nothing until you exceed generous limits, and the overage pricing ($0.20/M RUs + $0.50/GiB) is transparent. The Standard plan ($0.18/hour for 2 vCPUs, ~$131/month) is where CockroachDB becomes a serious production database with provisioned compute and private connectivity.
The Advanced plan ($0.60/hour for 4 vCPUs, ~$438/month minimum) targets enterprises needing compliance (PCI/HIPAA), CMEK, and five-nines availability. The core value proposition is PostgreSQL compatibility with built-in distributed SQL, automatic replication, and multi-region support — features that would require significant engineering effort to build on top of vanilla PostgreSQL.
The tradeoff: CockroachDB is 15-30% more expensive than managed PostgreSQL (RDS, Cloud SQL) for equivalent compute, but you get survivability and horizontal scaling that those services cannot match without manual sharding.
Pricing Plans
Free TrialBasic
Free
Serverless database with generous free tier and scale-to-zero
- 50M Request Units free/month
- 10 GiB storage free/month
- Scales to zero when idle
- Up to 30K RU/sec (~60 vCPUs)
- Up to 3 TiB storage
- AWS and GCP support
- Multi-region available
- IP allowlist access control
- 99.99% availability SLA
- Automatic 3x data replication
- Vector data and AI-ready tools
Standard
$0.18/per hour (2 vCPUs)
Provisioned compute with instant scaling for production workloads
- Provisioned compute up to 200 vCPUs
- Instant scaling
- On-demand storage
- AWS and GCP support
- Private connectivity
- Datadog metrics and log export
- 99.99% availability SLA
- Automatic 3x data replication
- Vector data and AI-ready tools
- No credit card required
Advanced
$0.6/per hour (4 vCPUs)
Enterprise-grade with compliance, multi-cloud, and highest availability
- Provisioned compute with unlimited scaling
- Up to 10 TiB storage per node
- AWS, GCP, and Azure (all regions)
- Up to 99.999% availability SLA (multi-region)
- Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK)
- PCI and HIPAA compliance controls
- Private connectivity
- Datadog integration
- Automatic 3x data replication
- Vector data and AI-ready tools
Hidden Costs & Gotchas
Request Unit consumption varies dramatically by query complexity. A simple key lookup costs ~1 RU, but a full table scan or complex JOIN can consume thousands of RUs. The 50M free RUs can evaporate quickly with unoptimized queries.
Storage includes 3x replication overhead. If you store 10 GiB of logical data, CockroachDB replicates it to 3 nodes — but you are billed on logical storage (10 GiB), not physical (30 GiB). This is fair but worth understanding for capacity planning.
Multi-region deployments multiply costs
each region runs its own set of nodes. A 3-region Advanced deployment costs 3x the single-region price — a minimum of ~$1,314/month before storage.
Cross-region reads and writes consume more RUs due to consensus latency. A write that touches 3 regions costs ~3x the RUs of a local write.
Egress/bandwidth charges are not included in CockroachDB pricing — the underlying cloud provider (AWS/GCP/Azure) charges separately for data transfer out of their network.
The Standard plan (preview) pricing may change before GA. Early adopters should confirm pricing locks or migration paths.
Advanced plan minimum is 4 vCPUs ($0.60/hour = ~$438/month) — you cannot start smaller and scale up. If you need compliance features but have light workloads, you overpay for compute.
Which Plan Do You Need?
Startups building new applications that need PostgreSQL compatibility with built-in horizontal scaling and zero-downtime schema changes from day one
Companies requiring multi-region database deployments with automatic failover and strong consistency — CockroachDB eliminates the need for custom replication logic
Teams running serverless or event-driven architectures that benefit from scale-to-zero on the Basic plan, paying only for actual database usage
Regulated industries (fintech, healthcare) needing PCI/HIPAA compliance, CMEK, and 99.999% availability SLA without managing database infrastructure
Our Recommendation
startup
Start on the Basic plan and let it scale with you. The serverless model means you pay proportionally to usage — no overprovisioning. Move to Standard ($0.18/hour) once you need private connectivity or predictable latency at higher throughput. The PostgreSQL compatibility means you can migrate from any Postgres database without rewriting queries.
enterprise
Advanced plan for compliance-heavy workloads (PCI, HIPAA). The 99.999% availability SLA on multi-region deployments is industry-leading for a managed database. Negotiate volume pricing — CockroachDB offers committed-use discounts for annual contracts. Budget $5,000-20,000/month for a production multi-region deployment with 3+ regions.
freelancer
The Basic free tier (50M RUs + 10 GiB) is generous enough for side projects and client prototypes. Scale-to-zero means you pay nothing during idle periods. Use it as a drop-in PostgreSQL replacement with free multi-region capability. For most freelance work, Neon Free (0.5 GiB storage) or Supabase Free (500 MB) are simpler alternatives if you do not need distributed SQL.
small Business
Standard plan is the sweet spot for production workloads with steady traffic. Provisioned compute gives consistent performance for $131-262/month (2-4 vCPUs). Compare carefully with managed PostgreSQL (RDS, Cloud SQL) — CockroachDB costs 15-30% more but eliminates the need for read replicas, manual failover, and custom sharding.
How CockroachDB Compares to Competitors
CockroachDB occupies a unique position: it is the only production-grade distributed SQL database that is fully PostgreSQL-compatible and available as a managed cloud service. Amazon Aurora offers PostgreSQL compatibility with better single-region performance and lower per-compute cost, but it cannot do true multi-region active-active writes. Google Spanner is the closest competitor in distributed SQL capability, but it uses a proprietary SQL dialect and costs significantly more ($0.90/node-hour vs $0.60/hour). PlanetScale (Vitess/MySQL) offers similar serverless scaling at lower prices but requires MySQL — not PostgreSQL. Neon and Supabase are excellent serverless PostgreSQL options that cost 50-70% less, but they are single-region databases without distributed SQL or automatic sharding. YugabyteDB is the main open-source alternative with PostgreSQL compatibility and distributed SQL, but its managed cloud service (Aeon) is less mature. Choose CockroachDB when you specifically need distributed SQL with strong consistency across regions — for single-region workloads, managed PostgreSQL (RDS, Cloud SQL, Neon) is simpler and cheaper.
