Understanding costs

LambdaDB offers a Free plan and a Standard plan. There is no minimum cost or base fee. If you have no usage, your cost is $0. On the Standard plan, usage is metered in four dimensions: read usage, write usage, storage usage, and inference usage. Charges are based on actual measured usage at the rates below. For the latest pricing details, see Pricing.

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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.
• Standard: usage is billed based on actual measured read usage, write usage, storage usage, and inference usage as described below.

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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)

For these operations, the size of the collection is reflected in read usage. Per-request minimum: each request is counted as at least 1 GB of read usage. Strong consistency: for query and fetch requests, 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). See also Search overview and Fetch data.

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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 with consistentRead 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).

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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).

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Inference usage

Inference usage applies when LambdaDB calls a managed model provider on your behalf, such as managed embedding generation during document writes or knn.queryText searches on managed embedding fields. 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 embedding models can have different LIU-per-token conversion rates. Usage is aggregated over the billing period before it is converted to the integer LIU quantity used for billing. Current managed embedding rates: If the aggregated LIU value is positive but less than 1, it is rounded up to 1 LIU so non-zero managed model usage is not dropped. See also Managed embeddings.

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Billing cycle

On the first day of each calendar month, usage for the previous month—read, write, storage, and inference—is aggregated and invoiced for the Standard plan.