Tinybird

Managed ClickHouse with a workflow that turns SQL queries into hosted HTTP APIs

As of 31 August 2026, Tinybird has a free plan and paid plans start at $25/month. A serverless analytics backend for developers building user-facing dashboards and real-time features. Softwr lists it under Databases. Tinybird is available on Web, Cloud, Linux, macOS.

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Overview

What Tinybird does

Tinybird gives you managed ClickHouse plus a delivery layer on top. You stream events in over an HTTP events endpoint or connect Kafka, S3, BigQuery or Postgres, write a parameterised SQL file called a Pipe, and Tinybird publishes it as an authenticated, rate-limited, low-latency REST endpoint. The whole project is a directory of .datasource and .pipe files kept in git and deployed with a CLI, so schemas and queries move through pull requests like application code. The distinguishing move is that it sells the last mile rather than the database. Plenty of vendors will host ClickHouse for you; Tinybird collapses the API server, auth tokens, query parameterisation and rate limiting that a team would otherwise build between ClickHouse and its front end. For a product team shipping an in-app analytics page, that is often several sprints of backend work they never write. Buyers are product engineering teams adding real-time analytics to a SaaS product, and data teams serving operational dashboards that Snowflake or BigQuery are too slow and too expensive to power interactively. The trade-offs are ClickHouse trade-offs: joins are awkward at scale, updates and deletes are expensive, and getting acceptable performance depends on choosing the right sorting key up front. On top of that, compute is billed per vCPU-second and storage per gigabyte, so a badly written query is directly a line on the invoice.

What people use it for

A SaaS product adding a per-customer usage dashboard that must render in under a second across billions of events
A team building rate limiting or fraud checks that need an aggregate over the last few minutes returned inside a request cycle
A data team offloading interactive operational dashboards from Snowflake, where per-query warehouse cost makes constant refresh untenable
A game or ad-tech company ingesting a high-volume event stream and exposing live counters back to customers through an API

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Tinybird.

It is ClickHouse underneath, so it inherits ClickHouse limits: multi-table joins degrade badly at scale, updates and deletes are expensive mutations rather than cheap operations, and a poorly chosen sorting key at table creation cannot be fixed without rebuilding the data.
Compute is metered per vCPU-second with overage at 0.0002 USD per second, so an inefficient query shipped to production shows up directly on the invoice rather than merely running slowly.
Only the Enterprise tier gets horizontal scaling and dedicated infrastructure; Free, Developer and SaaS all run on shared infrastructure with vertical scaling only, which caps both isolation and headroom for anyone not on a custom contract.
Storage is billed at 0.058 USD per gigabyte on top of compute, and egress is charged separately at 0.01 USD per gigabyte intra-cloud and 0.10 USD inter-cloud, so a high-fanout API serving many small responses accrues costs in three places at once.
You are building on a proprietary workflow around an open database: the pipes, tokens and API layer are Tinybird specific, so leaving means keeping your data but rewriting the entire serving layer you adopted Tinybird to avoid writing.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Tinybird

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

Tinybirdvs
ClickHouse
ClickHouse: If you want the same engine without the proprietary API layer, and you are willing to build the serving tier yourself
Tinybirdvs
Apache Pinot
Apache Pinot: If you need high-concurrency, low-latency queries and are prepared to operate a cluster
Tinybirdvs
Materialize
Materialize: If your workload is incrementally maintained views over streams rather than ad hoc analytical queries

Pricing

What Tinybird costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Free

0.25 vCPU on shared infrastructure
10 GB storage included
1,000 requests per day
One thread per request
Community support
No credit card required

Developer

$25 /mo

0.5 vCPU scaling to 8 vCPU
25 GB storage included
Two replicas
Vertical scaling only
Standard email support
vCPU overage at 0.0002 USD per second

SaaS

On request

Up to 32 vCPU
500 GB storage included
Four to sixteen threads per request
Standard or premier support
Custom pricing

Enterprise

On request

Unlimited vCPU and bottomless storage
Dedicated infrastructure and private regions
Vertical and horizontal scaling
Cluster management
Dedicated support
Custom pricing

Capabilities

Features

Managed ClickHouse
Hosted columnar database with vertical and, on Enterprise, horizontal scaling
Pipes as APIs
Parameterised SQL published as an authenticated REST endpoint with rate limits
Events HTTP endpoint
High-throughput ingestion over plain HTTP with no client library required
Streaming connectors
Native ingestion from Kafka, Confluent, S3, GCS, BigQuery, Snowflake and Postgres
Materialized views
Incremental rollups that pre-aggregate at ingest time
Git-based workflow
Datasources and pipes as files, deployed through a CLI and CI
Token-scoped auth
Per-tenant API tokens with row-level filters for multi-tenant dashboards
Observability
Built-in service datasources exposing query latency, errors and cost per endpoint

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Is Tinybird just hosted ClickHouse?

No. The database is ClickHouse, but the product is the layer above it: publishing parameterised SQL as authenticated, rate-limited REST endpoints without writing an API server.

What does it actually cost?

Free tier at 1,000 requests a day, Developer from 25 USD a month, then compute at 0.0002 USD per vCPU-second and storage at 0.058 USD per gigabyte. Higher tiers are quoted.

Can I run it on my own infrastructure?

Only on Enterprise, which offers dedicated infrastructure and private regions. Lower tiers are shared multi-tenant cloud.

Does it handle updates and deletes?

Poorly, as ClickHouse does. Design for append-only event data; frequent mutation is the wrong workload for this engine.

Keep looking

Where to go from Tinybird

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Tinybird, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.

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