Pricing at a glance
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| Decision point | What ClickHouse states |
|---|---|
Open source | Free under the Apache-2.0 license; you run it on your own servers |
Self-managed cost | Depends on your compute and storage resources and the headcount needed to manage the deployment |
ClickHouse Cloud billing | Pay only for the compute and storage you use, metered separately and scaled to zero when idle |
Entry price | The homepage FAQ says ClickHouse Cloud starts at $50/month |
Free trial | $300 in credits for 30 days; the trial ends when credits run out or 30 days pass, whichever comes first, then moves to pay-as-you-go. A card added during the trial is charged only after the credits are used or expire. |
How to buy | Directly, or pay as you go or by contract through the AWS, GCP and Azure marketplaces at identical pricing. Self-service customers pay monthly by credit card in USD. |
Sales-led options | Sales helps with complex setups and committed-spend pricing. Bring Your Own Cloud, which runs ClickHouse Cloud in your own VPC, is sold by custom quote. |
Which Cloud plan fits
Basic suits development, testing and small departmental workloads on a single replica.
Scale is built for production workloads.
Enterprise adds the controls regulated teams need.
You can upgrade from Basic to Scale, or from Scale to Enterprise, at any time.
Plans and what they include
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| Plan | Compute | Includes |
|---|---|---|
Basic | $0.2181 per unit / hr | Up to 1 TB storage; 8-12 GiB total memory; backups every 24h, retained for 1 day; 1 availability zone; export backups to your own cloud account; expert support with 1 business day response time; SSO using Google or Microsoft social login; MFA |
Scale | $0.2985 per unit / hr | Everything in Basic, plus: unlimited storage; configurable memory; compute-compute separation; configurable backups; 2+ availability zones; expert support with 1 hour response time 24x7 for Severity 1 issues; S3 role-based access; private networking; automatic vertical scaling; manual horizontal scaling |
Enterprise | $0.3903 per unit / hr | Everything in Scale, plus: SAML SSO; private regions; manual vertical scaling for custom profiles; enterprise support with 30 min response time for Severity 1 issues; named lead support engineer; transparent data encryption / CMEK; scheduled upgrades; consultative migration guides; HIPAA and PCI compliance |
How the Cloud bill adds up
The bill has two main meters. Storage is $25.30 per 1TB per month on Basic, Scale and Enterprise; ClickHouse says storage rates are the same across plans and vary only by cloud provider and region. It is metered on the compressed size of your data in object storage, plus backups, and is billed continuously for the data you keep.
Compute is billed per compute-unit-hour at the rate for your plan, cloud provider and region. One compute unit is 8 GiB of RAM and 2 vCPUs, metered per minute. Compute scales down to zero after a period of inactivity, so you stop paying for it until the next query or insert wakes the service.
Sizing guidance from ClickHouse
Compression. ClickHouse states that analytical data typically compresses around 10x, so 1 TB of raw data is often billed as roughly 100 GB of storage.
Memory. For real-time analytics, the ClickHouse pricing calculator estimates a memory-to-storage ratio of approximately 1:25. Use it as a starting point for compute size, not as a quote.
What moves the bill
Active compute hours. Because idle services scale to zero, how many hours a service is awake matters as much as its size. A maximum autoscaling limit and idle settings in the Cloud console cap this.
Plan choice. Each plan has its own hourly compute rate, so the plan sets the price of every compute-unit-hour you use.
Shared data. With compute-compute separation, several services can share one copy of your data, so storage is billed once.
Costs and terms that are easy to miss
Backups. Billed at the same per-TB rate as storage. Every service includes one backup every 24 hours retained for a day; Scale and Enterprise can configure more.
Data transfer. Public internet egress starts at $0.1152 / GB and inter-region egress at $0.0312 / GB. Ingress is free.
ClickPipes ingestion. Billed separately; the rate depends on the connector type.
Managed Postgres. In Beta on all three plans. The pricing page lists compute and storage from $0.125 per unit / hr for it.
Credit alerts. Trial and committed-spend customers are emailed automatically at 50%, 75% and 90% of their credits.
Our take
If you do not have people to run database servers, start on ClickHouse Cloud and use the 30-day credit to measure how many compute hours your real queries need before you pick a plan. If you do have that team, the open-source edition removes the license cost, but servers, storage and staff time become your bill.