Pricing Overview
Timescale is a time-series database built on PostgreSQL, offering a free tier with up to 10 GB of storage and paid plans starting at $29 per month. The platform targets teams running IoT analytics, monitoring dashboards, financial tick data, and any workload where time-stamped rows dominate. Because it extends PostgreSQL, existing SQL skills and tooling (psql, pgAdmin, any PostgreSQL-compatible ORM) transfer directly.
Plan Comparison
| Plan | Monthly Price | Storage | Key Capabilities |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Up to 10 GB | Hypertables, continuous aggregates, retention policies, community support |
| Paid | Starting at $29 | Scales beyond 10 GB | Everything in Free plus compression, tiered storage to S3, multi-node clustering, dedicated support SLAs |
The free tier is production-ready for small datasets — dashboards with a few million rows, developer sandboxes, or proof-of-concept deployments. The $29 starting point covers the base compute; storage beyond the included 10 GB is billed on consumption. Timescale Cloud handles provisioning, backups, and high availability so teams avoid the operational overhead of self-hosting.
Hidden Costs and Considerations
Timescale's listed prices cover compute and a baseline of storage, but several cost factors sit outside the headline number:
- Storage beyond the included tier: The free plan caps at 10 GB. On paid plans, additional storage is metered. High-cardinality time-series workloads (hundreds of thousands of unique device IDs) can grow storage faster than expected.
- Data transfer egress: Reading large result sets out of Timescale Cloud incurs network egress charges, similar to AWS or GCP egress pricing. Batch exports and cross-region replication amplify this.
- Connection pooling: Applications with many concurrent connections may need PgBouncer or a similar pooler; Timescale Cloud includes one, but self-hosted deployments need to provision it separately.
- Backup retention: Extended backup windows beyond the default retention period may carry additional cost on managed plans.
Cost Estimates by Team Size
- Solo developer or small project: The free tier at $0 handles up to 10 GB comfortably — sufficient for a monitoring dashboard ingesting a few thousand metrics per minute.
- Small team (3 to 10 engineers): The $29 per month starting plan with 25 to 50 GB of storage covers most mid-size workloads. Budget roughly $29 to $80 per month depending on retention window.
- Growth-stage company (10 to 50 engineers): Multi-node clusters with 200 GB to 1 TB of active data typically land in the $200 to $600 per month range on Timescale Cloud, depending on compute tier and replication.
How Timescale Pricing Compares
- InfluxDB Cloud: Also offers a free tier. Paid plans use a consumption model based on writes, queries, and storage. InfluxDB targets pure time-series workloads and uses its own query language (Flux), whereas Timescale retains full SQL compatibility via PostgreSQL.
- Amazon Timestream: A serverless time-series service priced per GB ingested and per GB scanned. Cost-effective for sporadic query patterns, but can become expensive under heavy analytical query loads. No PostgreSQL compatibility.
- QuestDB: Open-source time-series database optimized for high-throughput ingestion. Free to self-host, with a managed cloud offering. Lacks the PostgreSQL ecosystem breadth that Timescale inherits.
Timescale's main differentiator is full PostgreSQL compatibility — teams can JOIN time-series data with relational tables, use existing BI tools, and avoid lock-in to a proprietary query language.