DataStax builds Astra DB and Langflow on Apache Cassandra. See 2026 pricing, features, and what the 2025 IBM acquisition means for customers.
Category
Developer Tools
Pricing
Usage-based cloud pricing for Astra DB plus enterprise licensing, now offered through IBM, from Astra DB Free tier available with about 25 USD of monthly usage credit; Pay As You Go and Enterprise pricing scale from there
Verified
Not yet
Last updated
July 19, 2026
Founded
2010
Headquarters
Santa Clara, California, United States (now operating as part of IBM)
From Riptano to Astra DB
DataStax was founded in 2010 in Austin, Texas as Riptano by Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, two former Rackspace engineers who had worked with Apache Cassandra, before the company was renamed DataStax and its headquarters moved to Santa Clara, California.
DataStax launched Astra DB in May 2020 as a fully managed, serverless, cloud-native database-as-a-service built on Cassandra, removing much of the operational work of running Cassandra clusters directly, and later added native vector search so the same database could support AI applications alongside traditional workloads.
The 2025 IBM Acquisition
IBM announced its agreement to acquire DataStax on February 25, 2025, aiming to strengthen its watsonx portfolio with DataStax's NoSQL, vector database, and generative AI tooling, and the deal closed on May 28, 2025.
IBM has stated it will continue supporting the open-source communities DataStax was involved in, including Apache Cassandra, Langflow, Apache Pulsar, and OpenSearch, and DataStax's products, including Astra DB and Langflow, are now offered as part of IBM's product portfolio.
Astra DB Pricing Model
A Free tier gives developers a recurring monthly usage credit, commonly cited as around 25 USD, covering up to roughly 80GB of storage and about 20 million read and write operations a month, enough for prototypes and small production workloads.
Beyond the free tier, a Pay As You Go plan charges per operation and per gigabyte of storage or transfer with no upfront commitment, while an Enterprise or Standard tier adds private endpoints, customer-managed encryption keys, and multi-region deployment, typically negotiated directly with sales.
Key Features
Serverless database-as-a-service — Astra DB provisions a managed Cassandra-based database with usage-based scaling and no cluster management.
Native vector search — Supports storing and searching vector embeddings alongside operational data for AI and retrieval-augmented generation applications.
Langflow AI application builder — An open-source, low-code visual tool for assembling large language model application logic.
Usage-based pricing — Pay As You Go pricing charges per operation and per gigabyte of storage or transfer with no upfront commitment.
Multi-cloud deployment — Astra DB can be deployed across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.
Multi-region and private networking — Enterprise tier supports multi-region deployment and private network endpoints.
Customer-managed encryption keys — Enterprise customers can manage their own encryption keys for data stored in Astra DB.
Open-source foundation — Built on and continuing to support Apache Cassandra, Apache Pulsar, and OpenSearch open-source projects.
Pros & Cons
Pros
Built on the mature, battle-tested Apache Cassandra database
Combines operational data and vector search in one database