CockroachDB has no ongoing free tier; what it offers is a trial that expires. Distributed SQL database… Verified September 2026. Compare with 12 alternatives in Databases.

CockroachDB Free Trial 2026

free tier removed

How it ended: effective 2026-09-15 — CockroachDB stopped offering its free Basic plan (50 million RUs and 10 GiB of storage free per month) to new deployments on 2026-09-15, when it moved new clusters to Cockroach Continuum pricing. New Cloud organizations now get a 30-day free trial with $400 in credit. Clusters created before 2026-09-15 stay on their existing plans during their current term. Source ↗ Full history ↓

A verdict here is not a fixed property of the vendor. A one-off pricing event demotes a vendor while its recorded date falls in the last 180 days and then lapses on its own, with nothing about the vendor having changed; a standing condition — a free tier withdrawn and not restored, a product retired — does not lapse with time. This one rests on a standing condition, so it does not lapse.

Subtypes in Databases: relational — tables, rows and joins under SQL — Postgres, MySQL, SQLite family. We read that on 2026-08-31 from https://www.cockroachlabs.com/, where it says: “CockroachDB is a cloud-agnostic, AI-native, PostgreSQL-compatible data platform built for modern applications.” How we use this.

Limits, pricing history, and 12 alternatives. Verified September 2026. Last updated 2026-10-24.

CockroachDB has no ongoing free tier; what it offers is a trial that expires: Distributed SQL database… Its free tier has ended — one recorded free tier removal, on 2026-09-15. We no longer rate it. Best for databases workloads — 12 alternatives available.

One of 45 Databases services we track. See our full Databases Free Tier Comparison →

Tier

Trial

Free Tier Details

Distributed SQL database. No free plan for new deployments since 2026-09-15, when CockroachDB moved new clusters to Cockroach Continuum pricing. New Cloud organizations get a 30-day free trial with $400 in credit; Standard is $0.092 per vCPU-hour. Clusters created before 2026-09-15 stay on their existing plans during their current term.

We read that on 2026-10-24 from https://www.cockroachlabs.com/pricing/, and our check recorded: the page names CockroachDB as "cockroachdb" and states "$400" and "$0.092".

When CockroachDB's Free Trial Ends

When the trial ends, you must pay for further use.
At that point, the 12 alternatives in Databases are each listed with the free tier they offer, so you can compare what they give you against what you have outgrown.

Pricing Change History (2 recorded)

corrected effective 2026-09-26 medium impact

Data correction - Our re-read of 2026-09-16 recorded CockroachDB's pricing change as a new tier. It was the end of the free Basic plan for new deployments, effective 2026-09-15, and our catalogue kept listing the free plan until 2026-09-26. Source ↗

Before: Recorded 2026-09-16 as a new tier: The page offers a 30-day free trial with $400 in credit for new Cloud organizations, and then moves to paid plans like 'Standard' and 'Mission Critical'.

After: "These pricing plans apply to pay-as-you-go and committed-use CockroachDB Cloud customers with clusters created prior to September 15, 2026 and remain applicable to all clusters during their current term. Such pricing is no longer available for purchase."

removed effective 2026-09-15 high impact

CockroachDB stopped offering its free Basic plan (50 million RUs and 10 GiB of storage free per month) to new deployments on 2026-09-15, when it moved new clusters to Cockroach Continuum pricing. New Cloud organizations now get a 30-day free trial with $400 in credit. Clusters created before 2026-09-15 stay on their existing plans during their current term. Source ↗

Before: Basic: starts at $0/month, 50 million RUs and 10 GiB storage free per month, scales to zero

After: No free plan for new deployments. 30-day free trial with $400 in credit; Standard from $0.092 per vCPU-hour

View all 513 pricing changes across all vendors →

Alternatives in Databases

How CockroachDB compares against every one of the 12 we list, not against a selection of them. A surface with room for every member of a tied set may rotate their order. A surface with room for only some of them names none of them, because which ones it named would be the claim, and a claim seeded on the date is not the one we serve tomorrow. How we decide this.

Service	Free Tier	Stability
CockroachDB	Trial	risky
filess.io	Free filess.io is a platform where you can create two databases with up to 10 MB per database of the following DBMS for free: MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL.	stable
CrateDB	Free (CRFREE) Distributed SQL database for time-series and IoT — free cloud tier (CRFREE): 2 vCPUs, 2 GB RAM, 8 GB storage. One free cluster per org.	stable
Turso	Free Edge SQLite — 100 databases, 5 GB storage, 500M rows read/month, 10M rows written/month free. On 2026-10-02 Turso announced that Supabase is acquiring it.	stable
Xata	Free Open-source Postgres platform (Apache 2.0) with copy-on-write branching and scale-to-zero. Self-hosted on Kubernetes — free forever.	stable
Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL	Free Tier Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless on AWS Free Tier — managed PostgreSQL-compatible database with automatic scaling. Free plan: up to 4 ACUs and 1 GiB of storage per cluster, paid from AWS credits ($100 at sign-up, up to $100 more).	stable
Supabase	Free Postgres development platform: database, Auth, Storage, Realtime and Edge Functions. The Free plan is $0: unlimited API requests, 50,000 monthly active users, a 500 MB database on a shared CPU with 500 MB RAM, 5 GB egress plus 5 GB cached egress, 1 GB file storage, 500,000 Edge Function…	stable
Neon	Free Serverless Postgres with branching — free tier includes 100 CU-hours/month per project, 1 GB of Postgres storage per project (20 GB total across all projects), 5 GB of public network transfer per project per month, up to 100 projects, 10 branches per project, Neon Auth (60K MAU), auto-scaling up to…	stable
Nile	Free Postgres for multi-tenant apps — 1 GB storage, 50M serverless query tokens, 500 max connections. Unlimited databases and tenant DBs.	stable
Cloudflare D1	Free SQLite at the edge — 5M rows read/day, 100K rows written/day, 5 GB total storage. Resets daily at midnight UTC On the Free plan, once the account reaches its daily read or write limit, D1 refuses queries and returns errors until the limits reset at 00:00 UTC; upgrading to Workers Paid removes the limits. (From developers.cloudflare.com/d1/platform/pricing, read 2026-10-20.) On the Free plan a single D1 database can hold at most 500 MB, and an account can have at most 10 databases, within the 5 GB account total. (From developers.cloudflare.com/d1/platform/limits, read 2026-10-20.) Cloudflare D1's free plan needs no credit card. (From cloudflare.com/developer-platform/products/d1, read 2026-10-22.) D1 usage past Free limits requires the Workers Paid plan. That plan has a minimum charge of $5 per month per account. (From developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing, read 2026-10-29.) The Workers Paid plan includes 25 billion rows read, 50 million rows written, and 5 GB storage monthly. Rows read overage is $0.001 per million. Rows written overage is $1.00 per million. Storage overage is $0.75 per GB-mo. There are no egress charges. (From developers.cloudflare.com/d1/platform/pricing, read 2026-10-29.) Time Travel restores a database from up to 30 days ago on Workers Paid and 7 days on Free. The paid plan has a 10 GB maximum database size and 1 TB storage per account. (From developers.cloudflare.com/d1/platform/limits, read 2026-10-29.)	stable
Nhost	Free Open-source backend with Postgres and Hasura GraphQL, plus Auth, Storage and Functions. The Starter plan is $0 a month: 1 GB database, 1 GB storage and 5 GB egress, with functions, realtime APIs and unlimited users.	stable
SurrealDB Cloud	Free Multi-model cloud database — The 'Start' plan offers 1GB of storage free, forever, and a free compute instance with 0.25 vCPU and 1 GB memory ($0.000/hr). Further instances are available from $0.021/hr.	stable
Aiven	Free Managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Valkey (Redis-compatible), Apache Kafka, or OpenSearch — one free service of each type per organization. PostgreSQL and MySQL: 1 CPU, 1 GB RAM, 1 GB disk; PostgreSQL has 20 connections and no connection pooling.	stable

Left out of this list: MongoDB Atlas (shares no subtype with this product), Upstash (shares no subtype with this product), Firebase (shares no subtype with this product), Databricks (Lakeflow Connect) (none of this category's subtypes apply), Convex (shares no subtype with this product), Appwrite Cloud (shares no subtype with this product), PocketBase (shares no subtype with this product), Cloudflare KV (shares no subtype with this product), Momento (shares no subtype with this product), DynamoDB Local (runs only on a developer machine), Redis Cloud (shares no subtype with this product), Prisma Accelerate (extends another product), Weaviate (shares no subtype with this product), Zilliz Cloud (shares no subtype with this product), LanceDB (shares no subtype with this product), Upstash Vector (shares no subtype with this product), Chroma (shares no subtype with this product), Turbopuffer (shares no subtype with this product), Gel (we have not classified this record), Neo4j AuraDB (shares no subtype with this product), InfluxDB Cloud (shares no subtype with this product), Hasura (extends another product), 8base.com (shares no subtype with this product), codehooks.io (shares no subtype with this product), Couchbase Capella (shares no subtype with this product), restdb.io (shares no subtype with this product), SeaTable (none of this category's subtypes apply), skyvia.com (none of this category's subtypes apply), StackBy (none of this category's subtypes apply), Google Cloud BigQuery (shares no subtype with this product), PlanetScale (we have not classified this record), Cloudflare Vectorize (shares no subtype with this product). Each is still listed in Databases, with the vendor's own words we read that from on its page. How we decide this.

See full comparison →

Recompute today's order yourself. The order above is a permutation seeded only on the UTC date and the query key — no vendor name, slug, id or offer field is an input. The list above is every one of the 12 entries in that order, not a prefix of it. The algorithm is published, so anyone can reproduce this page's order without asking us.

date: 2026-11-14
query_key: alternatives:Databases:CockroachDB
seed: 9d8ab4d38876320aa3800fe6761cbcff80327bf28aab2eb14184ec58c943128e
tie_count: 12

Comparisons

CockroachDB vs Neon

Alternatives Guides Featuring CockroachDB

MongoDB Alternatives

Featured in Monthly Reports

September 2026 Report

Watch CockroachDB for Pricing Changes

We do not push notifications. Every change we record is readable the moment it lands, and the JSON answer carries an ETag — send it back as If-None-Match and an unchanged answer costs one 304.

curl https://agentdeals.dev/api/changes?vendor=CockroachDB
curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=CockroachDB

API docs →

Frequently Asked Questions

Is CockroachDB free?

No. What CockroachDB offers is a trial that expires: Distributed SQL database. No free plan for new deployments since 2026-09-15, when CockroachDB moved new clusters to Cockroach Continuum pricing. New Cloud organizations get a 30-day free trial with $4...

Is CockroachDB's free offer reliable?

CockroachDB's free tier has ended — one recorded free tier removal, on 2026-09-15: CockroachDB stopped offering its free Basic plan (50 million RUs and 10 GiB of storage free per month) to new deployments on 2026-09-15, when it moved new clusters to Cockroach Continuum pricing. New Cloud organizations now get a 30-day free trial with $400 in credit. Clusters created before 2026-09-15 stay on their existing plans during their current term. Source: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/cockroachdb/pricing/ There is no free tier left to rate.

Is CockroachDB's free offer good for production?

Not for long. It is a trial that expires, so plan for paid usage before you depend on it.

What changed in CockroachDB's pricing?

CockroachDB has had 1 recorded pricing change. Most recently: CockroachDB stopped offering its free Basic plan (50 million RUs and 10 GiB of storage free per month) to new deployments on 2026-09-15, when it moved new clusters to Cockroach Continuum pricing. New Cloud organizations now get a 30-day free trial with $400 in credit. Clusters created before 2026-09-15 stay on their existing plans during their current term. Source: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/cockroachdb/pricing/ (2026-09-15).

What are the best free alternatives to CockroachDB?

We publish no ranking of these. Nothing we record measures popularity or generosity, so naming a best or a top few would be our preference rather than our data. We hold 12 free alternatives to CockroachDB in Databases, each listed above with its tier. Of those, 12 carry no recorded demerit and are indistinguishable under every signal we hold, so they are listed in an order that rotates daily. Our ranking rule is published at /criteria.

What category is CockroachDB in?

CockroachDB is categorized under Databases on AgentDeals. We list 12 other Databases services alongside it, every one of them on this page with its free tier and the stability we publish for it.