Tinybird Pricing Breakdown
Tinybird bills on a fixed plan fee + vCPU overage model. You pick a plan that includes a baseline vCPU allocation, then pay overage only when usage exceeds that baseline per second. Both reads (queries) and writes (ingestion, MV processing) consume vCPU time. There is no per-query pricing, no per-GB-ingested pricing, and no per-row pricing.
Plans overview
| Plan | Base price | vCPUs | Storage included | Threads/request |
| Free | $0 | 0.25 (burst 3x) | 10 GB | 1 |
| Developer | $49+/mo | 0.5-8 | 25 GB | 1-8 |
| SaaS | Custom | 4-32 | 500 GB+ | 4-16 |
| Enterprise | Custom | Unlimited | Bottomless | Configurable |
What you pay for
1. Fixed monthly base fee
The Free plan costs $0 and includes 0.25 vCPU, 10 GB storage, and 1k requests/day. No credit card required, no time limit.
Paid Developer plans start at $49/mo (0.5 vCPU, 25 GB storage). The base fee reserves your vCPU baseline. You pay it even if you do nothing. Plans scale up to 8 vCPUs in self-service; beyond that requires SaaS or Enterprise.
2. vCPU overages (usage-based)
Each plan includes a baseline vCPU allocation (e.g. 0.5 vCPU on the smallest Developer plan). You can consume up to that many vCPU-seconds per second without overage. Usage above the baseline is billed at $0.0002/vCPU-second.
Both reads and writes count. Queries, ingestion, and materialized view processing all consume vCPU time.
Burst mode allows temporarily using 2x your plan's vCPU without overage. For batch operations (populates, copies), the entire job is allowed to finish even if it exceeds the per-second limit.
If nobody is querying and nothing is being ingested, zero vCPU-seconds are consumed beyond the baseline. No compute overage.
3. Storage (usage-based)
$0.058/GB/month for compressed data beyond the included amount. This is the average of daily maximum usage across all data sources.
4. Data transfer (usage-based)
- Intra-cloud (same provider + region): $0.01/GB
- Inter-cloud (different provider or region): $0.10/GB
- Private networking: $0.016/GB
5. On-demand CPUs
Temporary compute for jobs that run outside the baseline cluster (e.g. populate jobs). Billed by CPU cores and duration. Rates may vary by region.
What happens when nobody is querying
You pay only the fixed base fee (or $0 on Free) + storage. Zero vCPU overage.
For an OTel use case like Strada, you're almost never truly idle because data is continuously ingested. Every ingestion batch uses vCPU time. Materialized views firing on insert use more. But if traffic goes quiet (e.g. overnight for a dev tool), vCPU usage drops to near zero and stays well within your baseline allocation.
Cost estimates for OTel log storage
Assumptions for a typical mid-size SaaS backend (10 microservices, ~5000 RPM):
- ~50M log records/day
- Average compressed size per log record: ~200 bytes (ClickHouse ZSTD compression; raw OTel JSON is ~1-2 KB per record with
ResourceAttributes,LogAttributesmaps,Body,TraceId, etc.) - ~10 GB/day compressed storage growth for logs alone
Logs only
| Retention | Storage | Monthly cost (storage only) |
| 1 month | ~300 GB | $17/mo |
| 3 months | ~900 GB | $52/mo |
| 6 months | ~1.8 TB | $104/mo |
Full OTel stack (logs + traces + metrics + errors)
Traces and metrics typically add 2-3x the log volume.
| Retention | Total storage | Monthly cost (storage only) |
| 1 month | ~700 GB | $41/mo |
| 3 months | ~2.1 TB | $122/mo |
| 6 months | ~4.2 TB | $244/mo |
These are storage costs only. Add the base plan fee and vCPU overage from continuous ingestion + MV processing + user queries on top.
Comparison to Datadog
Datadog charges $0.10/GB ingested for logs plus $1.70/million events for indexing. For 50M logs/day at ~1 KB each = ~50 GB/day ingested = ~$150/day = ~$4,500/mo just for log ingestion. Tinybird storage is dramatically cheaper. But Tinybird doesn't include the Datadog UI, alerting, or APM features.
Auto-deleting old data (TTL)
Tinybird supports ClickHouse's native TTL (Time To Live) per data source. You set
ENGINE_TTL in each .datasource file independently. ClickHouse enforces the TTL during background merges automatically. No cron jobs needed.Strada defaults
| Data | Default | Notes |
| Traces | Kept | Set a custom TTL only if you want spans to expire |
| Logs | Kept | This also controls custom product events stored in otel_logs |
| Errors | Kept | Set a custom TTL only if you want extracted exceptions to expire |
| Metrics | Kept | Applies to gauge, sum, histogram, and exponential histogram rows |
| Browser analytics | 90 days | Fixed aggregates, independent from raw traces |
| Health checks | 90 days | Fixed result history |
| Issue state and users | Kept | Small mutable tables are not expired |
Change a Tinybird project's raw telemetry retention from the CLI:
strada projects retention -p api strada projects retention update -p api --traces-days 7 --logs-days 14 strada projects retention update -p staging --all-days 7 strada projects retention update --traces-days -1
Strada generates conditional
ENGINE_TTL rules only for projects that set a custom day count. Tinybird applies TTL-only changes as an in-place ALTER after promotion. Expired rows are removed during background merges, so deletion is not immediate.Setting a custom TTL can delete existing data. Pass
-1 to remove that custom TTL. Values must be between 1 and 365 days.Per-project custom retention currently requires Tinybird. Self-hosted ClickHouse keeps all raw telemetry unless you add table TTL yourself. Existing ClickHouse tables created with the earlier default TTLs need this SQL:
ALTER TABLE otel_traces REMOVE TTL; ALTER TABLE otel_logs REMOVE TTL; ALTER TABLE otel_errors REMOVE TTL; ALTER TABLE otel_metrics_gauge REMOVE TTL; ALTER TABLE otel_metrics_sum REMOVE TTL; ALTER TABLE otel_metrics_histogram REMOVE TTL; ALTER TABLE otel_metrics_exponential_histogram REMOVE TTL;
Key takeaways
- Storage is cheap ($0.058/GB/mo). Even at TB scale, it's a fraction of Datadog/Sentry.
- Compute is per-second, not per-minute. vCPU overage is $0.0002/vCPU-second above your plan's baseline. Both reads and writes count.
- No idle compute cost. If nothing is running, only the base plan fee and storage are charged. No "always-on" vCPU billing.
- Ingestion is included. No per-event or per-GB ingestion fee. The Events API, Kafka, S3, and all connectors are included in every plan.
- MV processing is negligible. Materialized view incremental updates have near-zero compute cost for typical workloads.
- Per-table TTL is fully supported. Use shorter retention for logs, longer for errors. This is the main lever for controlling storage costs.
- Self-hosted ClickHouse ($150-300/mo for a small VM) is the cheapest option if you don't need Tinybird's managed infra, JWT row-level filtering, or Events API.