How much does TiDB cost?

TiDB publishes 2 tiers, from Free for Serverless up to $250/month for Dedicated. The entry tier costs nothing.

What is the difference between Serverless and Dedicated on TiDB?

Dedicated costs $250/month against Free, and adds dedicated resources, sla guarantees, enterprise support.

Which databases tools can I use without paying?

5 of the 8 databases tools listed alongside TiDB have a free tier: Presto, Dremio, Solace PubSub+, StarRocks, EMQX.

Does TiDB charge per user?

The record carries a price and a billing period for each of its 2 tiers, but not the unit that price is charged in. Per-seat and flat-rate billing look identical in this data, so check the vendor's page before budgeting for a team.

Are these TiDB prices current?

They are what the catalogue entry holds, refreshed when the entry is. Vendors change pricing without notice and nobody at Softwr re-verifies each tier by hand, so treat this as a structured summary and the vendor's own pricing page as the authority.

What should I compare TiDB against before paying?

The closest databases tools in this directory are Canary Labs, Presto, Privacera, Dremio. Each has a side-by-side comparison with TiDB covering price, platforms and features.

Databases · pricing

TiDB pricing

TiDB publishes 2 tiers. Below is each one, what it adds over the tier beneath it, and where the ladder stops being worth climbing for most people.

As of 30 August 2026, TiDB pricing is free across 2 published tiers. Figures are the vendor's list prices as recorded on this page's last check; the vendor's site is the final word.

Entry price: Free
Model: Freemium
Tiers: 2
Free tier: Yes

TiDB plans, side by side

Every published tier in ascending order of price, with the number of features each one lists. An absence here means the record does not itemise it, not that the tier lacks it.

TiDB pricing tiers
Plan	Price	Features listed	Step up from the tier below
Serverless	Free	3	Entry tier
Dedicated	$250/month	3	+$250/month, 3 more features

What each tier adds

The set difference between each tier's feature list and the one beneath it. Where a tier lists nothing new, the vendor has either stopped repeating the inherited list or the tier raises limits rather than adding capability, the record does not distinguish the two, so this page does not either.

Serverless

Free

The entry tier. It covers 5gb storage, 50m request units, free forever tier.

Dedicated

$250/month

Over Serverless, this tier adds:

Dedicated resources
SLA guarantees
Enterprise support

Where TiDB stops being free

Serverless, Free

5GB storage
50M request units
Free forever tier

Dedicated, $250/month

The first thing you pay for:

Dedicated resources
SLA guarantees
Enterprise support

What the product covers

The full TiDB feature record, grouped as the catalogue groups it. This is the product as a whole; the record does not map every feature onto a specific tier.

Other

MySQL wire compatibility
Horizontal write scaling
Distributed ACID transactions
TiFlash columnar replica
Automatic rebalancing
Raft replication
Apache 2.0 licence
Online schema change
Change data capture
Managed cloud

People bring TiDB in for a mysql workload that has hit the write ceiling of a single primary and would otherwise need an application-level sharding layer, reporting that must run against current transactional data, where the columnar replica removes the delay and the cost of an etl pipeline, multi-region deployments needing a single logical database with automatic failover rather than manual primary promotion, migrating off a sharded mysql estate where the sharding logic in the application has become the main source of bugs and operational toil. If that is not the job you are buying for, the alternatives to TiDB are worth a look before you commit to a tier.

How that compares in Databases

Too few databases tools in this directory publish a starting price to quote a meaningful median, so the table below is a like-for-like list rather than a ranking.

TiDB entry price against other Databases tools
Tool	Entry price	Model	Rated	Head to head
TiDB (this page)	Free	freemium	-
Canary Labs	$3000/year	Per tag band per year	-	vs TiDB
Presto	Free	Open source, no licence fee	-	vs TiDB
Privacera	On request	quote	-	vs TiDB
Dremio	Free, then $0.2/hour	Per Dremio Compute Unit consumed	-	vs TiDB
Solace PubSub+	Free	quote	-	vs TiDB
StarRocks	Free	Open source, no licence fee	-	vs TiDB

Ratings are aggregated from third-party sources and imported with each catalogue entry, they are not reviews hosted on Softwr. How each figure is used is set out on the TiDB badges page.

Before you pay for TiDB

Three things this page cannot tell you, and all three change the bill. The record carries a price and a billing period but not the unit - per-seat and flat-rate pricing are indistinguishable in this data, so a five-person team may be looking at five times the figure above. It carries no annual rate, so any discount for paying yearly is not something this page can quote. And it carries no trial length.

What it can tell you is the shape of the ladder: 2 tiers between Free and $250/month, with the jump itemised above. Because there is a free tier, the cheapest way to answer the rest is to use it before paying anything.

TiDB runs on cloud, aws, azure, google cloud platform, self-managed, and is published by PingCAP of San Mateo, California. The full record is on the TiDB review, and the rest of the category is under best databases tools.

TiDB pricing on the vendor's own site

TiDB pricing questions

How much does TiDB cost?: TiDB publishes 2 tiers, from Free for Serverless up to $250/month for Dedicated. The entry tier costs nothing.
Does TiDB have a free plan?: Yes. The Serverless tier costs nothing and covers 5gb storage, 50m request units, free forever tier. Paying starts at $250/month for Dedicated.
What is the difference between Serverless and Dedicated on TiDB?: Dedicated costs $250/month against Free, and adds dedicated resources, sla guarantees, enterprise support.
Which databases tools can I use without paying?: 5 of the 8 databases tools listed alongside TiDB have a free tier: Presto, Dremio, Solace PubSub+, StarRocks, EMQX.
What am I actually paying for with TiDB?: The record lists 10 features across 1 area: other. In practice it is brought in for a mysql workload that has hit the write ceiling of a single primary and would otherwise need an application-level sharding layer, reporting that must run against current transactional data, where the columnar replica removes the delay and the cost of an etl pipeline, multi-region deployments needing a single logical database with automatic failover rather than manual primary promotion.
Does TiDB charge per user?: The record carries a price and a billing period for each of its 2 tiers, but not the unit that price is charged in. Per-seat and flat-rate billing look identical in this data, so check the vendor's page before budgeting for a team.
Are these TiDB prices current?: They are what the catalogue entry holds, refreshed when the entry is. Vendors change pricing without notice and nobody at Softwr re-verifies each tier by hand, so treat this as a structured summary and the vendor's own pricing page as the authority.
What should I compare TiDB against before paying?: The closest databases tools in this directory are Canary Labs, Presto, Privacera, Dremio. Each has a side-by-side comparison with TiDB covering price, platforms and features.