This page describes how charges accumulate in CockroachDB Serverless.
Pricing overview
With CockroachDB Serverless, you are charged for the storage and activity of your cluster. Cluster storage is measured in GiB and based on the total volume of storage used over the billing period. Cluster activity, including SQL queries, bulk operations, and background jobs, is measured in Request Units, or RUs. A Request Unit is an abstracted metric that represents the size and complexity of requests made to your cluster. Note that a single activity or request could cost more than 1 Request Unit. Request Unit consumption scales to zero when your cluster has no activity, so you will only be charged for what you use.
RU and storage consumption is prorated at the following prices:
| Unit | Cost |
|---|---|
| 1M Request Units | $0.20 |
| 1 GiB storage | $0.50 |
Choosing resource limits
Your cluster's resource limits are the maximum amount of storage and RUs you can use in a month. If you reach your storage limit, your cluster will be throttled and you will only be able to delete data or increase your storage limit. If you reach your RU limit, your cluster will be disabled until the end of the billing cycle unless you increase your RU limit.
The best way to estimate your resource usage is to set resource limits you're comfortable with and run your workload. You can see the RUs and storage your cluster has used in the Usage this month section of the Cluster Overview page. Once enough usage data is available, you can also see a graph of your monthly resource usage and recommended spend limit on the Edit cluster page.
To estimate the RU consumption of individual SQL statements, you can use the EXPLAIN ANALYZE SQL statement. For an example, see Example Request Unit calculation.
We recommend setting your resource limits to about 30% higher than your expected usage to prevent unexpected throttling. To learn about tuning your workload to reduce costs, see Optimize Your CockroachDB Serverless Workload.
All Org Administrators will receive email alerts when a cluster reaches 50%, 75%, and 100% of its resource limits.
Free vs. paid usage
CockroachDB Serverless clusters scale based on your workload so that you will only pay for what you use beyond the free resources. All CockroachDB Cloud organizations are given 50 million RUs and 10 GiB of storage for free each month. Free resources can be spent across all CockroachDB Serverless clusters in an organization and will appear as a deduction on your monthly invoice.
You must set resource limits if you've already created one free CockroachDB Serverless cluster. Setting resource limits will allow your cluster to scale to meet your application's needs and maintain a high level of performance. To set your limits, you can either set storage and RU limits individually, or enter a dollar amount that will be split automatically between both resources. You can also choose an unlimited amount of resources to prevent your cluster from ever being throttled or disabled.
Learn more
- Learn About Request Units
- Optimize Your CockroachDB Serverless Workload
- Manage Your CockroachDB Serverless Cluster
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