Astra DB Serverless billing and usage

In the Astra Portal, you can view your organization’s subscription plan, payment method, billing, and usage details.

Manage your subscription

DataStax offers multiple subscription plans. All plans above the free tier are also referred to as paid plans, premium organizations, and qualified organizations. For complete plan details, see the Astra DB Serverless pricing page.

  • Free

  • IBM watsonx.data PayGo

  • Enterprise

The Free plan recieves a fixed amount of credits each month. Once these credits are consumed by your database activity, the databases are hibernated until the next billing cycle refreshes the credit balance or your upgrade to a paid plan.

The Free plan has the following limitations:

To remove these limitation, upgrade your plan.

To upgrade to a paid plan, click Upgrade in the Astra Portal.

For a self-managed pay-as-you-go option, you can subscribe to IBM watsonx.data PayGo:

  1. Go to the AWS Marketplace IBM watsonx.data PayGo subscription page.

  2. Click View purchase options, and then purchase the Marketplace offering.

  3. After completing the purchase, click Set up your account.

  4. On the IBM sign in page, sign in with your IBMid or create a new IBMid.

  5. Follow the prompts to complete the account setup.

  6. On the Set up your subscription page, enter an IBM SaaS account name, and then click Next.

  7. Provide a region and instance name for your first IBM SaaS instance deployment, and then click Submit and provision.

  8. Go to the Astra Portal, and then sign in with the IBMid you used to set up your IBM SaaS account and subscription.

To upgrade from the Free tier to a marketplace-funded subscription, click Upgrade in the Astra Portal.

For more information,see the Astra pricing page or contact DataStax Support.

To downgrade to the Free tier from a marketplace-funded subscription, contact DataStax Support.

On an Enterprise plan, your organization is part of a larger enterprise account with negotiated pricing, billing, and support options.

To start or manage an Enterprise subscription, contact DataStax through the Astra pricing page or your account representative.

Enterprise plans include enterprise organization management, where you can view and manage multiple Astra organizations under one Astra enterprise.

Understand your bill

In the Astra Portal, you can view your organization’s upcoming and past bills, credit balance, and usage details on the Billing page:

  1. In the Astra Portal header, click Settings.

  2. In the Settings navigation menu, click the name of the active organization, and then select the organization where you want to view billing details.

    If the organization belongs to an enterprise, select the enterprise, and then select the organization in the Organizations list.

  3. In the Settings navigation menu, click Billing.

Estimated bill

The Estimated Bill is based on the active organization’s usage for the current billing period.

  • For the Free tier and marketplace-funded subscriptions, the estimated bill is based on the organization’s total usage.

  • For Enterprise subscriptions, the estimated bill reflects any amounts over your credit balance and committed monthly minimum, which are charged at your discounted rate.

    The estimated bill reflects only the credits and usage for the organization you’re currently viewing. Due to variations in usage, each organization in your enterprise can have a different estimated bill.

Bills are automatically drafted monthly, based on UTC date and time.

Credits

Credits Remaining reflects your current credit balance for the current billing period:

  • Free plans get a fixed amount of free monthly credits. Credits Remaining reflects your remaining monthly credits.

    Unused free credits don’t roll over to the next month. Free monthly credits reset on the first of every month for all organizations on the Free plan.

    If your credit limit runs low, Astra DB Serverless prompts you to upgrade your subscription, and DataStax notifies you by email and in the Astra Portal. If database usage consumes all of your free monthly credits, your organization’s databases are suspended until you add a payment method or wait for the next billing cycle to refresh your monthly credits.

  • Marketplace-funded plans can purchase credit packages. Credits Remaining reflects your remaining purchased credits.

  • Enterprise plans require an annual commitment. Credits Remaining includes the balance of any unused credits, along with the committed monthly minimum that is billed in arrears at the end of the month.

Usage

The Databases Usage and Streaming Tenants Usage sections provide a summary of usage for individual Astra DB databases and Astra Streaming tenants within the organization you’re currently viewing.

Read requests (per 1M)

A Read Request Unit (RRU) is the unit of measure for billing database reads. RRUs are based on the payload of each read query response:

  • A read request that returns up to 4kB of data is considered one RRU.

  • If a request returns more than 4kB of data, additional RRUs are required.

  • If a read request involves server-side filtering or aggregation of data, then the data is measured before the filtering or aggregation takes place. For example, this applies to queries that use the ALLOW FILTERING clause, COUNT function, or GROUP BY clause, and queries that don’t request all columns from a row.

For organizations on the Enterprise plan, databases that belong to a PCU group are not billed for RRUs.

Write requests (per 1M)

A Write Request Unit (WRU) is the unit of measure for billing database writes. WRUs are based on the payload size and other characteristics of each write request:

  • A write request with up to 1kB of data is considered one WRU.

  • If a request has more than 1kB of data, additional WRUs are required.

  • A DELETE request is considered one WRU, regardless of size. There are no additional charges for the TTL delete operation, DROP statements, or TRUNCATE statements.

  • A write index is considered a write request. The write index size and the required WRUs are based on the size of each indexed column instead of the size of the index, regardless of the column type.

  • Writes in multi-region configurations are billed for each region written to.

  • Insert, update, and upsert options are treated as write operations and calculated as WRUs.

  • WRUs required for batched writes depend on the size and type. Logged batch writes require additional WRUs by default.

    For example, a single partition unlogged batch write operation with 10 rows where each row contains 1.2kB of data requires 12 WRUs. This is based on the total size of the single partition rows divided by 1kB: (10 rows * 1.2kB)/1kB = 12 WRUs.

    By comparison, a two partition logged batch write operation with 2 rows (one row for each partition) where each row contains 1.2kB of data requires 5 WRUs. This is based on the size per table in the batch (in this case, 2 * 1.2kB = 3 WRUs), plus two additional WRUs for the logged batch operation: (2 * 1.2kB)/1kB + 2 = 5 WRUs.

For organizations on the Enterprise plan, databases that belong to a PCU group are not billed for RWUs.

Storage (GB per month)

Data storage includes all data stored in the database, including the actual data, indexes, and metadata.

It is calculated based on logical storage consumption and the greatest amount of data stored in a given month. There are no additional billed charges for standard backups of your data, which are included in the base storage costs.

Storage usage is reported in MB but billed by GB per month.

Data transfer (GB)

Data transfer refers to the transfer of your data out of a database, including data transferred between multi-region replicas to meet the replication factor for the data. Billable units and pricing depend on the scope of the data transfer:

  • Data Transfer - Same Region: The transfer occurs within the same region of a cloud provider network.

  • Data Transfer - Cross Region within Cloud Provider Network: The transfer crosses regions within one cloud provider network.

  • Data Transfer - Internet: The transfer leaves the cloud provider network over the internet.

Multi-region replication incurs additional charges for network egress between regions, based on the source region. Adding a region incurs a one-time data transfer charges to replicate all data to the newly added region.

Data transfer usage is reported in MB but billed by GB.

Other usage

Certain features incur billed changes based on hourly runtime or other metering, depending on the feature. Such features include, but aren’t limited to, the following:

Invoices and usage reports

In the Invoice and usage reports section of the Billing page, you can do the following:

  • Download an organization’s past invoices in PDF format.

  • View an organization’s monthly usage reports directly in your browser.

  • Download usage reports in CSV format for organizations and enterprises.

Download organization invoices

To download an invoice for an organization, do the following:

  1. In the Astra Portal header, click Settings.

  2. In the Settings navigation menu, click the name of the active organization, and then select the organization where you want to view billing details.

    If the organization belongs to an enterprise, select the enterprise, and then select the organization in the Organizations list.

  3. In the Settings navigation menu, click Billing.

  4. In the Usage section, find the month for which you want to download an invoice, and then click Download invoice (PDF).

Get organization usage reports

To get a usage report for an organization, do the following:

  1. In the Astra Portal header, click Settings.

  2. In the Settings navigation menu, click the name of the active organization, and then select the organization where you want to view billing details.

    If the organization belongs to an enterprise, select the enterprise, and then select the organization in the Organizations list.

  3. In the Settings navigation menu, click Billing.

  4. In the Usage section, find the month for which you want to view a usage report.

  5. Click Usage reports, and then select one of the following:

    • Download daily usage (CSV): Download daily usage history for the given month

    • View monthly usage (web): View usage history for the given month in your browser

Get enterprise usage reports

In the Astra Portal, you can download a usage report CSV for all organizations in an enterprise:

  1. In the Astra Portal header, click Settings.

  2. In the Settings navigation menu, click the name of the active organization, and then select your enterprise.

  3. In the Settings navigation menu, click Overview.

  4. In the Usage Reports section, click Usage reports, and then select Download daily usage (CSV) to download usage history for the given month.

You can also use the DevOps API to get selective usage details for specific organizations or resources in your enterprise. For more information, see Manage your enterprise: Enterprise billing and usage.

Usage report contents

The usage report CSV file includes the following columns:

  • PRODUCT: The name of the Astra product or service generating usage.

  • ORG_ID: The organization ID.

  • ORG_NAME: The organization name.

  • RESOURCE_ID: The ID of the resource generating usage, such as a database or streaming tenant.

  • RESOURCE_NAME: The resource name.

  • REGION: The region where the resource is deployed and generating usage.

  • CLOUD_PROVIDER: The cloud provider that hosts the given REGION.

  • CLASSIFICATION: The region pricing classification, such as standard or premium.

  • ZONE: Indicates if usage is coming from a specific zone, including na (North America), apac(Asia Pacific), or emea (Europe, Middle East, Africa).

  • CLUSTER_SIZE: For Astra DB Classic databases, this is the cluster size, such as c10 or c20. For Astra DB Serverless databases, this is empty.

  • AZ_COUNT: For Astra DB Serverless databases, this is 3 because these databases are triple replicated to three availability zones. For Astra DB Classic databases this is empty regardless of actual replication.

  • USAGE_TYPE: The specific type of usage that was generated.

  • USAGE: The amount of usage generate.

  • USAGE_UNIT: The unit of measurement for USAGE, such as hour, gib, or million.

  • CURRENCY_TYPE: The currency type used for billing.

  • UNIT_PRICE: The price per unit of usage in the given CURRENCY_TYPE.

  • CALCULATED_COST: The total cost for an amount of USAGE during the given time period defined by the TIMESTAMP columns.

  • BREAKDOWN_START_TIMESTAMP: The beginning of the period for which usage was calculated.

  • BREAKDOWN_END_TIMESTAMP: The end of the period for which usage was calculated.

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