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Layerbase Cloud is the easy way to run a database in production: 18 engines, a free tier with no credit card, and flat monthly plans. Layerbase Desktop brings the full engine suite and admin UI to your laptop as a local runner and multi-database IDE, and the Layerbase CLI runs the same engine runtime from the terminal with native binaries, no containers required.

Neon, PlanetScale, Supabase, Railway, Render, Aiven, Upstash, DigitalOcean Managed Databases, Turso, Vercel KV, Algolia (we host Meilisearch, the open-source alternative, with a real console), and MongoDB Atlas (with branching, which Atlas does not offer, via FerretDB). More engines than any single one of them, and a free tier that does not expire.

Idle databases sleep and wake on your next connection, typically in about a second for most engines. On Free that happens after 15 minutes without connections (30 minutes for MySQL and MariaDB, which take around 20 seconds to start). Paid plans wait 6 hours, and pinning a database to your always-on pool keeps it awake entirely.

Open the database in the /cloud dashboard and click Restore. This is the only way to bring an archived database back; archived databases reject connection attempts at the network level.

MongoDB's SSPL license restricts how managed providers can offer it. Apache-licensed FerretDB implements the MongoDB wire protocol on PostgreSQL, so existing drivers and common CRUD, aggregation, index, and transaction workflows keep working. Mongo-only features such as change streams and Atlas Search are not supported.

Yes. Layerbase has guided, read-once migrations for Cloudant to CouchDB, MongoDB Atlas to FerretDB, Turso to libSQL, and other supported sources. The migration reads the source without modifying it.

Layerbase Desktop is free for personal use on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Get it from the desktop page.

Free requires no credit card, includes 8 engines, and sleeps idle databases after 15 minutes, waking them on the next connection. Solo is $5/mo for 2 Standard databases, with a pool that keeps one of them always on. Pro is $15/mo for up to 10 databases, every engine, and an allocatable always-on pool. Pro pool blocks are $10/mo and paid-plan team seats are $3/member/mo. Billing is flat, with no usage meters.

$0/mo with no credit card, covering 8 engines: 2 databases, 5 GB of storage, up to 20 concurrent connections, 1 instant branch per database, and 1 manual backup slot with no scheduled backups. Databases sleep after 15 minutes idle and wake on the next connection, usually in about a second. It is not a trial and has no expiry date.

A free database hibernates after 15 minutes of inactivity (30 for MySQL and MariaDB), keeping its address and data. If it stays hibernated for about 14 days (7 if you never connected to it) it is archived: the live address is released and connecting fails until you open the database and click Restore, which usually takes ten to thirty seconds. Data and backups are kept. After 90 continuous days archived the live resources are reclaimed, and even then your most recent backup is kept and one-click restorable. Paid plans are never auto-archived.

Canceling on purpose never suspends your account: you drop to Free at the end of the period you already paid for. A declined renewal is different. The subscription goes past-due, the payment provider retries the card over the next several days, and your account is suspended across every server within seconds. While suspended, new database creates and other account changes are blocked, but your existing databases keep running and stay reachable, so a failed card does not take your apps offline. Recovery is automatic once a payment succeeds, and nothing is deleted along the way.

Layerbase Cloud runs with a United States primary database region: user databases and control-plane metadata are stored on Layerbase Cloud infrastructure in Ashburn, Virginia. Backups are stored in Cloudflare R2, a global object storage service that may route, replicate, or cache data outside that primary location. There are no customer-selectable regions, EU-only hosting, or contractual residency guarantees today, so if your workload needs a specific jurisdiction, talk to us before you upload it.

Yes, on every plan. Export on the database page produces a fresh dump of the current state and hands it to you as a download, and it keeps working on a locked or archived database, so it is also how you get your data out after a downgrade. Any stored backup in the list downloads the same way, and a free database that has been archived long enough to be removed still keeps its most recent backup available to download or restore.

In transit, always: TLS 1.3 on every connection, on every plan, with no downgrade path, and every connection string we hand you already has it turned on. At rest the honest scope is narrower. Backups are stored with a separate provider, Cloudflare R2, which encrypts objects at rest. Live database volumes get whatever our infrastructure does at the disk layer and nothing beyond it: we add no application-level encryption, hold no customer-specific keys, and offer no customer-managed keys today.

We publish no uptime SLA document today, and free-tier usage carries no availability commitment at all. On refunds: canceling a monthly plan stops the next renewal rather than returning the period you are already in, and prepaid dedicated terms are non-refundable. You can always ask, and we may grant a refund at our discretion, worked out at the standard monthly rate for the months the term has already covered.