lambdadb usage to inspect current Free quotas or recorded Pay as You Go usage and cost estimates for a project or organization.
Plans
LambdaDB offers two plans:- Free: includes up to 1 PB read usage, 2 GB write usage, 2 GB storage usage, and 500K LIU inference usage per month at no cost. After a Free plan limit is reached, additional usage is restricted.
- Pay as You Go: usage is billed at the rates described below, with no minimum charge or per-collection fixed fee. Inactive collections still incur storage usage while their data is retained.
Read usage
Read usage is billed at $5 per read PB (petabyte) of measured usage. The following requests contribute to read usage based on collection size:- Collection query (document query)
- Document fetch (document fetch)
- Document list (document list)
partitionFilter narrows the request to selected physical partitions, and read usage reflects their combined size. Unselected partitions are not searched. This requires explicit partition selection; an ordinary document predicate does not by itself narrow the billed partition scope. See Partition selection.
Per-request minimum: each request is counted as at least 1 GB of read usage.
Strong consistency: for query and fetch requests that directly select a branch, if you set consistentRead to true, an additional 1 GB is added to read usage for that request (on top of the per-request minimum and the collection-size basis). Tag and alias reads do not support strong consistency. See also Search overview and Fetch data.
Write usage
Write usage is billed at $1 per write GB of measured usage. Upsert, update, and bulk-upsert (document upsert, document update, document bulk upsert) are measured from the size in bytes of the document payload you send in the request body. Update (document update) only: each request always runs an internal document fetch with strong consistency (equivalent to fetch withconsistentRead set to true). That work is billed as read usage under Read usage—including collection-size basis, the per-request minimum, and the Strong consistency rule.
Per-request minimum for upsert, update, and bulk-upsert: 50 KB.
Delete (document delete): 100 KB of write usage is added per delete request (fixed amount).
Storage usage
Storage is billed on physical storage at $0.33 per GB-month. If you use branching, logical storage and physical storage can differ; billing follows physical storage. Usage is computed from hourly averages of stored data. Those averages are summed into GB-hours over the billing period (not a single end-of-month snapshot).Data returned and retention storage
The public pricing page also lists these usage meters:
Billing for these two meters starts with advance notice. Include them when estimating costs beyond the promotion; do not treat the promotional waiver as a permanent free tier. Retention storage for deleted data is distinct from an inactive collection whose documents remain stored. The regular storage charge still applies to that inactive collection.
Inference usage
Inference usage applies when LambdaDB calls an inference provider on your behalf, such as native embedding generation during document writes,knn.queryText or knn.queryInputs searches on native embedding fields, or native reranking. Supplying vectors directly skips embedding inference. A query that also requests reranking still incurs reranking inference usage.
Inference usage is measured in LIU (LambdaDB Inference Unit) and billed at $1.05 per 1M LIU.
LambdaDB converts provider/model token usage into LIU using LambdaDB’s internal rate card. For example, different models can have different LIU-per-token conversion rates, and image inputs are metered as image tokens with their own rate. Usage is aggregated over the billing period before it is converted to the integer LIU quantity used for billing.
If the aggregated LIU value is positive but less than 1, it is rounded up to 1 LIU so non-zero native inference usage is not dropped.
See Native embeddings and Native reranking for feature setup and behavior.
Native embedding rates
Embedding models have no output tokens. Cohere image inputs are metered in image tokens reported by the provider; one million image tokens equal 400,000 LIU, or $0.42.
Native reranking rates
At the $1.05 per 1M LIU rate, one million Jev input tokens equal 42,000 LIU, or $0.0441 before plan allowances and integer-LIU rounding. Output tokens add zero LIU. Pricing is based on measured token usage, not provider request count.
A successful reranking stage with complete valid usage records the sum of input/output tokens across its batches. Failed, fallback, or incomplete-usage stages do not produce a customer reranking token event. Query read usage and any native query-embedding usage remain separate from reranking inference usage.