TiDB Cloud is PingCAP's managed, MySQL-compatible distributed SQL database. See pricing tiers, features, and how it compares to alternatives.
TiDB Cloud is the fully managed cloud database service from PingCAP, the company founded in 2015 that created the open-source TiDB distributed SQL database. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with major engineering operations in China, PingCAP built TiDB to be MySQL-compatible so existing applications can adopt it with relatively low migration effort while gaining horizontal scalability beyond what a single MySQL server can provide.
The defining architectural feature of TiDB is HTAP, or Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing. TiDB pairs a distributed row-based storage engine for transactional operations with a columnar storage engine called TiFlash for analytical queries, enabling real-time analytics to run directly against live production data without building a separate data warehouse or ETL pipeline.
TiDB Cloud removes the operational burden of running TiDB yourself by handling provisioning, scaling, backups, and high availability across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, and increasingly markets itself toward AI and agentic application workloads by adding native vector search capabilities alongside its transactional and analytical engines.
TiDB Cloud offers horizontal scaling that lets storage and compute grow independently as data volume increases, along with high availability through Raft-based multi-replica consensus and support for multi-region deployments to reduce latency and improve resilience.
The platform's serverless Starter tier autoscales automatically and bills on consumption, making it well-suited for variable or unpredictable workloads, while Essential and Dedicated tiers provide provisioned capacity for teams that need predictable performance at scale.
Additional capabilities include built-in vector search for AI and retrieval-augmented generation workloads, integrations with tools like Kafka and Spark for streaming and analytics pipelines, and MySQL wire-protocol compatibility that lets existing MySQL drivers, ORMs, and BI tools connect with minimal changes.
TiDB Cloud pricing is structured across three tiers. The Starter (serverless) tier includes a free monthly quota of 5 GiB row storage, 5 GiB columnar storage, and 50 million Request Units per instance, with up to five free instances per organization, then bills per Request Unit and per GiB-month of storage beyond that, with standard US regions costing less than premium regions like Singapore, Tokyo, and Frankfurt.
The Essential tier uses provisioned Request Capacity Units with a 2,000-RCU minimum, running roughly $400 per month on AWS Oregon before storage costs, while the Dedicated tier bills node-based clusters hourly, starting around $0.44 per hour for a 4 vCPU node, and is available across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure for teams needing enterprise-grade isolation and scale.
TiDB Cloud is PingCAP's fully managed cloud service for TiDB, an open-source, MySQL-compatible distributed SQL database.
TiDB Cloud is made by PingCAP, a company founded in 2015 and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
TiDB itself is open source; TiDB Cloud is the managed, paid cloud service built on top of the open-source database.
Yes, TiDB Cloud uses the MySQL wire protocol, letting existing MySQL drivers, ORMs, and applications connect with minimal changes.
TiDB Cloud offers a Starter serverless tier with a free quota, an Essential tier with provisioned capacity from around $400 per month, and a Dedicated tier billed hourly per node.
TiDB is the open-source database software that can be self-hosted, while TiDB Cloud is PingCAP's fully managed version that handles provisioning, scaling, and operations.
It is used for applications needing horizontal scalability beyond single-node MySQL, real-time analytics on live data, and increasingly AI applications using vector search.
Yes, TiDB can be self-hosted on-premises or in a private cloud as an alternative to using the managed TiDB Cloud service.