CockroachDB Cloud Pricing, Features & Alternatives
Distributed SQL That Survives Anything
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CockroachDB Cloud Overview
CockroachDB Cloud Information Resource Links
Category
Pricing Model
Pricing Examples
What is CockroachDB Cloud?
CockroachDB Cloud is the managed version of CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database built by Cockroach Labs (founded 2015 by ex-Google engineers Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, and Ben Darnell). It speaks the PostgreSQL wire protocol but uses its own distributed architecture for horizontal scaling and survivability — it can keep running through node, zone, and even region failures.
Use Cases
- Global applications — Multi-region clusters with low-latency local reads
- Compliance and data domiciling — Pin data to specific regions for regulatory rules
- Mission-critical systems — Up to 99.999% availability on the Advanced tier
- Transactional workloads — Serializable, strongly consistent transactions across regions
Architecture
CockroachDB is PostgreSQL-wire-protocol compatible, so most Postgres tools, ORMs, and drivers work out of the box. It automatically shards and rebalances data across nodes, replicates each range 3x by default, and recovers from failures transparently. The trade-off versus single-node Postgres is that distributed consensus adds latency to writes and shapes how you design schemas and indexes.
Plans and Pricing
Cockroach renamed its tiers. The old Serverless is now Basic, and the old Dedicated split into Standard and Advanced.
- Basic (serverless) is usage-based and scales to zero. Every organization gets a $15/month free credit, equal to 50 million Request Units (RUs) and 10 GiB of storage. Beyond that you pay roughly $0.20 per million RUs and $0.50 per GiB-month. RUs bundle CPU, IO, and network into one unit, so write-heavy apps can spend RUs faster than storage.
- Standard provisions vCPUs for steady workloads, starting around $0.18 per vCPU-hour (about $130/month for 2 vCPUs), scaling to 200 vCPUs.
- Advanced adds Azure support, many more regions, multi-region replication, CMEK, and HIPAA/PCI compliance, with custom pricing and up to 99.999% availability.
New customers also receive $400 in trial credits, and Basic and Standard require no credit card to start.
CockroachDB core is source-available under the Business Source License (BSL 1.1), which converts to Apache 2.0 after a few years, so you can also self-host.
CockroachDB Cloud Features
Category
Managed
Available
Self Hosted
Available
DBaaS
Available
API Gateway
Available
Container Deployment
Kubernetes
Available
CockroachDB Cloud Integrations
Airflow
Available
AWS
Available
Azure
Available
Datadog
Available
dbt
Available
GCP
Available
Kafka
Available
Prometheus
Available
Vercel
Available
CockroachDB Cloud Pricing
Plans
CockroachDB Cloud bills two ways. Basic (serverless) is pure usage-based: you pay per Request Unit (RU) for compute and per GiB-month for storage, and it scales to zero. Standard and Advanced are provisioned: you pay per vCPU-hour whether or not you use it. Every plan replicates data 3x across availability zones. The gotcha on Basic is RUs — every query, write, and index update burns RUs, so a busy app can blow through the free 50M RUs fast even at low storage.
Standard
$ Custom per month
- 2 vCPUs start at ~$0.18/hour (~$130/month) Available
- Provisioned vCPUs, instant scaling up to 200 vCPUs Available
- On-demand storage up to 3 TiB Available
- Private connectivity (PrivateLink / VPC peering) Available
- Metrics and log export to Datadog Available
- Data transfer and backups billed separately Available
- 99.99% availability Available
- No credit card required to start Available
Advanced
$ Custom per month
- 4 vCPUs start at ~$0.60/hour Available
- Provisioned compute and storage, unlimited scale Available
- AWS, GCP, and Azure, single or multi-region Available
- CMEK, PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2 support Available
- Up to 10 TiB storage per node Available
- Up to 99.999% availability (multi-region) Available
- Custom pricing, contact sales Available
Resource Pricing
Basic (serverless) metered rates. Request Units (RUs) abstract CPU, IO, and network into a single unit; every read, write, and background job consumes RUs. Storage is charged on the GiB you actually store over the month. The first $15/month (50M RUs + 10 GiB) is free per organization.
Request Units (free)
First 50 million RUs / month
$0
Request Units (paid)
per additional million RUs
~$0.20
Storage (free)
First 10 GiB / month
$0
Storage (paid)
per GiB-month beyond free tier
$0.50
Instances Pricing
Standard and Advanced are provisioned tiers billed per vCPU-hour, shown here as approximate monthly prices (730 hours). Unlike Basic, provisioned compute is billed whether or not your cluster is busy. Exact rates vary by cloud provider and region; data transfer, backups, and changefeeds are billed separately on top.
Standard (min)
2 vCPUs (~$0.18/hour)
130 /month
Advanced (min)
4 vCPUs (~$0.60/hour)
440 /month
Standard (max)
Up to 200 vCPUs
Custom /month
Advanced (max)
Unlimited vCPUs
Custom /month
CockroachDB Cloud Regions
CockroachDB Cloud runs on AWS, GCP, and Azure. Basic (serverless) and Standard share a curated set of AWS and GCP regions; Advanced adds Azure and many more regions, and supports multi-region clusters that replicate across regions for survivability. The table below lists the AWS and GCP regions available on Basic and Standard.
16 CockroachDB Cloud datacenter locations and IDs per region
Source: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/cockroachcloud/regions
Location | Region | ID |
|---|---|---|
| US East (N. Virginia) | North America | aws/us-east-1 |
| US East (Ohio) | North America | aws/us-east-2 |
| US West (Oregon) | North America | aws/us-west-2 |
| US Central (Iowa) | North America | gcp/us-central1 |
| US East (South Carolina) | North America | gcp/us-east1 |
| US West (California) | North America | gcp/us-west2 |
| Canada (Calgary) | North America | aws/ca-west-1 |
| Canada (Central) | North America | aws/ca-central-1 |
| Ireland | Europe | aws/eu-west-1 |
| London | Europe | aws/eu-west-2 |
| Frankfurt | Europe | aws/eu-central-1 |
| Belgium (St. Ghislain) | Europe | gcp/europe-west1 |
| Frankfurt | Europe | gcp/europe-west3 |
| Mumbai | Asia Pacific | aws/ap-south-1 |
| Singapore | Asia Pacific | aws/ap-southeast-1 |
| Singapore (Jurong West) | Asia Pacific | gcp/asia-southeast1 |
Last updated: June 18, 2026
*Information is subject to change. Verify with the official CockroachDB Cloud website.
Best CockroachDB Cloud Alternatives
Alternatives to CockroachDB Cloud by matching platform type, use cases, supported runtimes and deployment options.
Frequently Asked Questions about CockroachDB Cloud
CockroachDB Basic starts free, with $15/month of usage (50 million Request Units plus 10 GiB storage) covered per organization. After that you pay roughly $0.20 per million RUs and $0.50 per GiB-month. The part people miss is that Basic bills compute in Request Units, not vCPUs — every query and write burns RUs, so a busy app can run up a bill even with a tiny database.
Basic gives every organization a $15/month free credit, which works out to 50 million Request Units and 10 GiB of storage. It is genuinely useful for prototypes and low-traffic apps, and it scales to zero. The limits that matter are RU consumption and storage: high write volume or heavy indexes eat RUs quickly, and you pay per GiB past 10 GiB.
Cockroach renamed its tiers: the old Serverless is now Basic and the old Dedicated split into Standard and Advanced. Basic is serverless and billed per Request Unit. Standard is provisioned vCPUs (from about $0.18/vCPU-hour) for steady workloads. Advanced adds Azure, more regions, multi-region replication, CMEK, and HIPAA/PCI, with up to 99.999% availability and custom pricing.
A Request Unit (RU) is CockroachDB’s single billing unit for serverless compute, bundling CPU, disk IO, and network into one number. Every read, write, index update, and background job consumes RUs. This is the thing to model before you commit: storage can look cheap while RU usage quietly drives the bill on a write-heavy workload.
The CockroachDB core is source-available under the Business Source License (BSL 1.1), which converts to Apache 2.0 after a few years, and you can run it yourself at no license cost for most uses. Your costs move to your own servers, storage, and operations. That is fine if you want full control, but you give up the managed scaling and multi-region tooling of CockroachDB Cloud.
No. You can start Basic and Standard clusters without a credit card, and new customers also get $400 in trial credits. Billing matters once you exceed the $15/month free Basic allowance or run a provisioned Standard or Advanced cluster.
Yes, but only on the Advanced tier. Advanced supports HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOC 2 with customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK). Treat compliance as an Advanced-plan and paperwork question: you need the right tier, a signed agreement, and the proper configuration.
For distributed SQL at scale, compare TiDB and YugabyteDB. For Postgres-first serverless without the RU model, look at Neon and Supabase. The right choice depends on whether you need true multi-region survivability or just elastic, cheap Postgres.