$0, $5, $15, or your own server. No meters.

Layerbase is a different paradigm. Metered clouds sell you compute minutes on their fleet, so your bill is a formula. Layerbase hosts a complete database platform for you at a flat monthly fee, the way self-hosting would work if someone else did all the work. The developer experience is indistinguishable from the metered clouds: a dashboard, branching, wake-on-connect, one connection string. The architecture underneath is closer to running it yourself, which is where the reliability, security, and flat economics come from.

MySQL needs Solo or higher - it idles at roughly half a gigabyte of RAM, about twice the weight of the other relational engines on Free. MariaDB, a free MySQL-compatible drop-in (same wire protocol, same drivers), is included on every plan. When this changed, every existing Free MySQL database got a grace window (the exact date shows in your dashboard) plus a guided path to migrate to MariaDB or upgrade.

Free is built for development: full engines, real connection strings, instant branching. But it's capped at 20 concurrent connections, runs on shared burst CPU, sleeps after an hour idle, and has no scheduled backups - limits a dev never feels and a production app can't live with. Pro lifts all of them: uncapped connections, reserved capacity from your pool, always-on pinning, and 30-day rolling backups. How database branching works.

A reservation of always-on capacity - 1.5 GB of RAM, 1 vCPU, and 25 GB of storage - that you allocate across your databases however you like. Pin a Standard database always-on or create a Performance engine and it draws from the pool; un-pin it and the capacity comes back. Need more? Stack $10 blocks.

Idle Standard databases scale to zero - they stop consuming resources after 60 minutes without connections (6 hours on Pro). The next connection wakes them automatically; you never have to press a button. Wake times are measured per engine and shown on this page - most are a few seconds.

Analytical and search engines like ClickHouse and QuestDB hold significant state in memory, and their restarts can be slow with real data. Instead of making promises that break, they simply run always-on from your pool - predictable for you, honest from us.

Only on the free tier, after 14 days hibernated (7 days if it was never used). Archived databases stay safe - data preserved, connections paused, one-click restore from the dashboard. Pro databases are never archived.

We never delete your last backup. On paid plans nothing is removed. On the free tier, a database left archived for 90 days is removed to free up shared capacity (with warning emails first), but we keep your most-recent backup and you can always download it from the dashboard. Restoring it or upgrading stops the clock.

Your data is never deleted. Databases that no longer fit the smaller pool fall back to sleep-on-idle (Standard) or are stopped, not deleted (Performance), and you can re-allocate or re-subscribe anytime. Storage over the new quota gets a read-only grace period before archive.

Your databases keep running until the end of the billing period, then your account moves to free-tier limits. Existing data is preserved - you just cannot create new databases beyond the free quota until you re-subscribe.

Yes, on Pro and Custom, for PostgreSQL databases. Turn it on per database and every connection then needs both a valid client certificate and its password - never one without the other. Each database has its own certificate authority; you issue certificates from the dashboard or API, and rotating the CA revokes every certificate at once. Because Layerbase passes TLS straight through to your database rather than terminating it at a shared proxy, the certificate check happens at your database itself.