CockroachDB vs Turso
Pricing
CockroachDB: 30-day trial with $400 credit, then from $0.092 per vCPU-hour
Turso: Free tier (5 GB storage, 100 databases), paid from $4.99/mo billed yearly
Description
CockroachDB: Distributed SQL database that survives outages, Postgres-compatible, with usage-based cloud pricing
Turso: SQLite-compatible cloud database built for one database per user, agent or tenant, with sync to devices
Pros
- Postgres-compatible wire protocol: use your existing Postgres drivers and ORMs
- New cloud organizations get a 30-day trial with $400 of credit, no credit card needed for Standard
- Multi-region by design: your data survives zone and region failures automatically
- Cheap to run many databases: idle databases cost only storage
- Free tier includes 5 GB storage, 100 databases and 500 million row reads a month
- Open-source, SQLite-compatible engine that also runs locally for free
Cons
- No free tier for new customers: after the trial, Standard costs about $203/mo for 2 vCPUs and 100 GB
- Higher query latency than single-region Postgres (consensus overhead on every write)
- Overkill for most solo founder projects: distributed consistency adds complexity you rarely need
- Some Postgres features are missing or behave differently (limited extensions, partial full-text search functions)
- Edge replicas are no longer offered to new users: fast local reads now come from replicas or sync inside your app
- Ecosystem is young: fewer ORMs and tools have native Turso support compared to Postgres
- Not suited for heavy relational workloads that need JOINs across large tables
Details
CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database that speaks the Postgres wire protocol. Your existing Postgres drivers, ORMs, and queries work without changes. The key selling point is resilience: data is automatically replicated across nodes, so a zone going down does not take your database offline.
Cloud pricing for new deployments from 15 September 2026 is pay-as-you-go. Every new organization gets a 30-day trial with $400 of credit. After that, clusters pause until you add a payment method and are deleted after a 30-day grace period. The Standard edition costs $0.092 per vCPU-hour, about $203 a month for 2 vCPUs and 100 GB, and Mission Critical costs $0.162 per vCPU-hour. Existing customers stay on their current plans. For most solo founders this is more database than you need, both in cost and in write latency. For simpler use cases, Neon or Supabase give you standard Postgres with free tiers.
Turso takes SQLite and makes it work as a cloud database. Its design goal is many small databases rather than one big one: you can give every user, workspace or AI agent its own isolated database, and idle ones cost only storage. Embedded replication lets the same database run inside your app or on a user’s device, reading and writing locally and syncing with the cloud. Turso no longer offers edge replicas in multiple regions to new users.
The free tier gives you 5 GB of storage, 100 databases, 500 million row reads and 10 million row writes a month. Paid plans start with Developer at $4.99 a month billed yearly ($5.99 monthly) and Scaler at $24.92 billed yearly ($29 monthly). On 2 October 2026 Turso announced that it is being acquired by Supabase. It says the service keeps running as before and the open-source engine stays in active development; the announcement does not mention plan or price changes. If your app is read-heavy or naturally split per tenant, Turso is fast and cheap. If you need complex relational queries or heavy write throughput, Postgres on Neon or Supabase is a better foundation.
Verified
