Astra DB Serverless billing and usage

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

Manage your subscription

DataStax offers three tiers of subscription plans for Astra organizations:

Free

Organizations on the Free plan receive 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 you upgrade to a paid plan.

The Free plan has the following limitations:

No more than five databases.
Inactive databases are automatically hibernated and scheduled for deletion. For more information, see Database statuses: Hibernated.
Cannot export metrics.
Cannot use premium features, such as custom domains and multi-region databases.

To remove these limitation, upgrade your plan by clicking Upgrade in the Astra Portal.

To downgrade to the Free tier from a paid plan, contact IBM Support.

Marketplace (IBM watsonx.data PayGo)

A pay-as-you-go subscription that you manage through a cloud provider marketplace. Paid plans include premium features such as private endpoints, customer managed encryption keys, and enterprise organization management.

Enterprise

A contract-based plan with negotiated pricing, billing, and support options. Paid plans include premium features such as private endpoints, customer managed encryption keys, and enterprise organization management.

For complete plan details and IBM Sales contact information, see the IBM watsonx.data pricing page. For provisioned capacity unit (PCU) pricing, see the Astra DB PCU pricing page.

Upgrade to a Marketplace or Enterprise plan

To upgrade to a Marketplace or Enterprise subscription plan, you must activate your subscription, create an IBM SaaS account, create an IBM SaaS instance, and then accept the Astra invitations.

You must complete this entire process to fully activate your upgraded Astra plan and Astra organizations. Specifically, you must accept the Astra invitation emails to assume administration of your Astra organization and enterprise under your Marketplace or Enterprise plan.

Additionally, your existing Astra organizations aren’t upgraded automatically. At the end of the upgrade process, you can contact IBM Support to add your existing organizations to your upgraded plan.

Purchase an IBM watsonx.data subscription:
- Marketplace: In the Astra Portal header, click Upgrade. Under Marketplace, click Go to AWS to go to the IBM watsonx.data PayGo offering on the AWS Marketplace. Then, click View purchase options to purchase the Marketplace offering.
- Enterprise: Contact IBM Sales through the IBM watsonx.data pricing page.
Set up your subscription:
- Marketplace: After purchasing the Marketplace offering, click Set up your account in the AWS console, or follow the link in the subscription confirmation email. Sign in with an IBMid, and then follow the prompts to add an IBM SaaS account to your subscription.
- Enterprise: After activating your contract, work with your account representative to set up your subscription and IBM SaaS account.
Subscription setup is critical for both Marketplace and Enterprise plans. If your IBM SaaS account isn’t attached to your IBM watsonx.data subscription, then you cannot complete the Astra subscription plan upgrade process. For assistance, contact IBM Support.
Deploy an IBM SaaS instance by providing a region, instance name, and tenant owner email address, and then click Submit and provision.

Each IBM SaaS instance generates an Astra organization. Your first IBM SaaS instance creates your first upgraded Astra organization, and it creates an Astra enterprise to manage all organizations that are associated with the same IBM SaaS account.

The instance’s region has no effect on the regions where your Astra DB databases can be deployed.

If you create multiple instances, each instance generates a separate Astra organization under the same enterprise.

The tenant owner determines the initial administrator for the Astra organization. The IBM SaaS account owner is the initial administrator for the Astra enterprise.
After the instance reaches the Running state, make sure you receive the following emails:
- An instance created notification from IBM, sent to the tenant owner or IBM SaaS account owner.
- An Astra enterprise invitation from DataStax, sent to the IBM SaaS account owner.
- An Astra organization invitation from DataStax, sent to the tenant owner.
If the IBM SaaS account owner and tenant owner have different email addresses, check both inboxes.

If you don’t receive the invitation emails within 48 hours, contact IBM Support.

Follow the links in both invitation emails to accept the organization and enterprise invitations.

Both invitations must be accepted to assume administration of the Astra organization and enterprise.

If either invitation isn’t accepted, then the corresponding administrator user won’t be activated, and you won’t be able to manage that entity.

The invitee must sign in to the Astra Portal with the email address that received the invitation to accept the invitation and activate the associated administrator user. The IBM SaaS account owner must sign in to the Astra Portal with their IBMid. The tenant owner can use any sign-in option as long as they use the same email address that received the Astra organization invitation.

Once the initial invitations are accepted, the administrators can invite additional administrators and users to the Astra organization and enterprise.

Furthermore, the initial organization has no databases because it is a new organization. You must contact IBM Support to add your existing organizations to your upgraded plan.

Optional: If you want to create additional Astra organizations, create more IBM SaaS instances in your IBM SaaS account.

Every time you create an instance, that instance’s tenant owner must accept their Astra organization invitation email to activate their administrator privileges in that organization. The invitation must be accepted even if every instance has the same owner.

However, the IBM SaaS account owner only has to accept the initial enterprise invitation. Any additional IBM SaaS instances created under the same IBM SaaS account are automatically associated with the existing Astra enterprise.
Optional: To add existing Astra organizations to your upgraded plan and Astra enterprise, contact IBM Support.

View credit balance and consumption details

In the Astra Portal, you can view your credit balance and usage details on the Billing page:

In the Astra Portal header, click Settings.
In the Settings navigation menu, click the name of the active organization, and then select the enterprise or organization where you want to view billing details.

At the enterprise-level, you can view aggregate billing details for all organizations under the enterprise.

At the organization-level, you can view billing details for that specific organization. To inspect a specific organization within an enterprise, select the enterprise, and then select the organization in the Organizations list.
In the Settings navigation menu, click Billing.

Credits

Credit balance and consumption depends on your subscription plan:

Free plans get a fixed amount of free monthly credits. The Billing page shows your remaining monthly credit balance.

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 upgrade your subscription plan or wait for the next billing cycle to refresh your monthly credits.
Marketplace plans depend on your IBM watsonx.data subscription. Monthly credit consumption is billed against your marketplace subscription.
Enterprise plans require an annual commitment with a contracted credit balance. The enterprise-level Billing page shows your Total contracted credits and the amount of credits consumed in the Current billing cycle.

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

Usage

At the enterprise-level, the Billing page shows aggregate billing details for all organizations under the enterprise.

The Consumption breakdown section shows the amount of credits consumed by each organization under the enterprise for the current billing cycle, as well as slices of consumption by activity type (reads, writes, data transfer, and storage). This helps you identify busy organizations that are consuming more credits than others so you can allocate costs across business units or teams.

You can filter usage by organization, time period, and resource type for more granular insights into your enterprise’s credit consumption.

At the organization-level, the Billing page shows billing details for that specific organization. Insights are limited to the scope of that organization.

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 WRUs.

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:

Private endpoints and custom DNS
Multi-region databases
Vector dimension reads and writes per million vector dimensions
Provisioned Capacity Units (PCUs)

Usage reports

You can use the Astra Portal and the DevOps API to download usage reports for Astra organizations.

Get organization usage reports

In the Usage reports section of an organization’s Billing page, you can view an organization’s monthly usage reports directly in your browser, and you can download usage reports in CSV format:

In the Astra Portal header, click Settings.
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.
In the Settings navigation menu, click Billing.
In the Usage section, find the month for which you want to view a usage report.
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.

Organization usage reports don’t include PCU usage. To inspect PCU usage for an organization, see Monitor PCU groups in Astra.

Get enterprise usage reports

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

In the Astra Portal header, click Settings.
In the Settings navigation menu, click the name of the active organization, and then select your enterprise.
In the Settings navigation menu, click Billing.
In the Usage Reports section, click Usage reports, and then select the report that you want to download:
- Download daily usage (CSV): Download daily usage history for the given month.
- Download PCU allocation (CSV): Download a PCU usage report for the given month. This report is available only for organizations with PCU groups in months where PCU usage occurred.
  
  PCU usage isn’t included in the daily usage report.

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.

Daily usage report contents

The daily 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 Managed Cluster 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 Managed Cluster 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.

The daily usage report doesn’t include PCU usage.