TiDB Cloud

MySQL-compatible distributed SQL database; Starter is its autoscaling serverless tier (formerly Serverless).

Always free
Commercial use not stated
No card required

Free tier

Five free MySQL-compatible Starter instances per org, each with 5 GiB row + 5 GiB columnar storage and 50M RUs/month.

Free quota applies to the first 5 MySQL-compatible Starter instances in each organization
5 GiB row-based storage per instance
5 GiB columnar storage per instance
50 million Request Units (RUs) per instance per month
PostgreSQL-compatible Starter (public preview): first 10 instances free, each with 50 GiB row-based storage and 500 million RUs per month

Gotchas

Starter on Alibaba Cloud (Singapore) is in public preview; Starter on AWS is generally available.
When an instance uses up its free quota, new connections are refused and existing ones are throttled until the month resets or the spending limit is raised.
A credit card and spending limit are required for a sixth instance or any spending limit above $0.
Starter requires TLS connections.
PostgreSQL-compatible Starter is a public preview intended for development and evaluation, not production.
Serverless was renamed Starter (Aug 2025) and clusters became instances (Apr 2026); CLI commands still say serverless.
Both CLIs (ticloud and the newer ti) are in public preview.

Setup

What you do

Sign up at https://tidbcloud.com/free-trial (Google, GitHub or Microsoft sign-in is fastest).
On My TiDB, click Create Resource and select Starter, then choose Alibaba Cloud as the cloud provider and Singapore as the region. Keep the spending limit at $0 so it stays free.
Open that instance, click Connect, click Generate Password, and copy the connection string.
For CLI access, approve the browser prompt from ticloud auth login, or create an API key under Organization Settings > API Keys.

How your agent gets access

Connection string

Get it at: tidbcloud.com
Env var: DATABASE_URL

From the instance's Connect dialog (Generate Password first); TLS is required on the public endpoint.

CLI login

Install

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tidbcloud/tidbcloud-cli/main/install.sh | sh

Run

ticloud auth login

OAuth device flow that opens a browser for the human to approve. To create the Alibaba Cloud Singapore instance from the CLI, find its region name with ticloud serverless region, then run ticloud serverless create --display-name <name> --region <region>.

API key

Run

ticloud config create --profile-name <name> --public-key <public-key> --private-key <private-key>

Get it at

tidbcloud.com

Create under Organization Settings > API Keys; this command saves the public/private key pair to a CLI profile.

Check it worked

ticloud project list