Scaling global startups on distributed SQL

CockroachDB Serverless provides a free tier with 250 million Request Units and 10 GiB of storage per month. Users pay $1 for every additional 10 million Request Units or $1 for every additional gigabyte of storage. This model eliminates capacity planning for small projects. Production workloads require CockroachDB Dedicated, where annual contracts typically cost between $25,000 and $200,000. Dedicated pricing depends on vCPU count, storage, and region configuration. Compute rates range from $0.60 to $1.20 per vCPU-hour. For mid-sized deployments with 32 to 64 vCPUs across multiple regions, annual contracts typically fall between $75,000 and $150,000 depending on the specific cluster configuration and commitment level. You should avoid Serverless for workloads with deep requirements that need dedicated resources. CockroachDB Serverless uses logical size for storage, which counts the size of all rows. This system automatically stores three replicas of all data across different availability zones. All users receive a 99.99% uptime SLA.

Google Spanner charges for compute capacity via nodes or processing units, storage, data replication, and network bandwidth. Spanner Standard costs $0.90 per hour per node. The Enterprise Plus edition reaches $4.617 per hour for base configurations. Spanner storage costs $0.000712329 per GiB-hour for SSD. To handle high-priority tasks, Google recommends keeping CPU utilization below 65% for regional instances to ensure service levels during zonal failures. Minimum production instances can be as small as 100 processing units. YugabyteDB uses a similar vCPU-hour model. YugabyteDB Standard starts at $0.057 per vCPU-hour. YugabyteDB supports 300 connections per node by default. I find the Spanner pricing structure harder to forecast because it combines processing nodes, storage tiers, and highly variable cross-region network egress fees. You, if you are running a small prototype, can start with the free tier.

Startups must account for the data egress tax when moving data between cloud providers. Cloud providers charge fees when data leaves their network, and these fees can reach 15% of total cloud spend. Google Cloud charges $0.12 per GiB for outbound data to most worldwide destinations. This egress fee discourages multi-cloud strategies. CockroachDB stays cloud-agnostic by running on AWS, GCP, or Azure. Spanner creates heavy vendor lock-in because its architecture depends on Google’s proprietary TrueTime hardware.

High-throughput applications on CockroachDB Serverless move to Dedicated once monthly costs exceed $4,000. CockroachDB Dedicated provides 24/7/365 enterprise support. YugabyteDB scales writes linearly. In contrast, Amazon Aurora limits write scaling to vertical upgrades of the master node. YugabyteDB also scales connections by adding more small instances.

CockroachDB handles migrations through its MOLT toolkit, which includes tools for schema conversion and verification. This toolkit helps move data from Oracle, Postgres, or MySQL. CockroachDB’s multi-region capabilities, which remain in preview for Serverless, allow users to distribute data across multiple cloud regions while maintaining a single logical database. Users pay only for the exact storage and compute resources they use. I think CockroachDB’s pricing is the most predictable for a startup that needs to manage budget constraints without complex manual sharding. CockroachDB Dedicated supports users on AWS, GCP, and Azure. This availability allows organizations to choose between cloud providers or mix workloads between owned data centers and public cloud providers. For those needing to move data out of CockroachDB, the native CHANGEFEED command enables scalable, resilient streaming to Kafka, cloud storage, and webhooks.

Will the continued development of Spanner Omni solve the latency issues inherent in its leader-dependent write architecture?