TimescaleDB Pricing: Managed vs Self-Hosted
The cheapest managed TimescaleDB starts at about $30/month. Self-hosted, this stack measures 2 GiB across 1 service, which fits a $13/month flat plan with room left over.
#the numbers
Managed prices as of June 2026, each linked to its source. The self-hosted row is not an estimate: the RAM figure is what this stack allocates in its compose file, and the plan is the smallest one that holds it.
| Option | Plan | Monthly | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted on Miget ★ | 2 GiB, 1 vCPU | $13 | the whole stack, flat - no per-user or per-request metering, and the plan holds your other apps too |
| Tiger Cloud | Performance | ~$30 | published floor (hourly-metered compute) + storage ~$0.88/GB-mo post-compression; Timescale Inc. is now TigerData |
| InfluxDB Cloud | Serverless (usage) | usage-based | ~$10-15/mo small workload ($0.0025/MB in, ~$1.46/GB-mo stored, $0.012 per 100 queries) - scales with use |
Tiger Cloud has a genuinely useful free tier (750 MB/service); self-hosting wins once data is always-on and growing.
#the difference, plainly
$17/month, or about 57%, against the cheapest managed tier - $204 over a year. Worth stating what that money buys and what it costs, because the honest answer is not "it is just cheaper".
- You gain a bill that does not move with usage, no execution or seat metering, and root on your own data.
- You gain spare capacity: the plan is sized for this stack, and anything else you deploy inside it is free.
- You take on upgrades, backups and the pager. Managed services charge for exactly that, and for some teams it is worth every dollar.
- You should not switch for the saving alone if your team has nobody who wants to own it.
#on usage-based pricing
InfluxDB Cloud bills by usage rather than a fixed monthly price, so a table cannot compare it honestly. The structural difference is the one that matters: a flat plan has a known worst case, and a meter does not.
#what it costs on other platforms
Same stack, published rates elsewhere - estimates from each platform's own pricing page, not quotes.
| Platform | Estimated monthly | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Miget ★ | $13 | flat plan, 2 GiB - databases included, no meters |
| Heroku | ~$100 | no volumes; nothing between 1 GB ($50) and 2.5 GB ($250) dynos - 2 GB containers cost far more than shown |
| Render | ~$30 | per-service instances (0.5 GB $7, 2 GB $25) - every container is its own paid service |
| DO App Platform | ~$29 | no persistent volumes - stateful containers need managed DBs/Spaces (base $5 Spaces included here) |
| Railway | ~$23 | usage-based ($10/GB RAM-mo); vCPU billed separately at $20/vCPU-mo on top |
| Fly.io | ~$15 | cheapest sticker price - but burstable shared CPUs (1/16 core; dedicated vCPUs cost ~2-3×), no compose deploys (one app per container, manual wiring), managed DBs billed extra |
#sizing, if you outgrow the small plan
The $13 plan is the smallest that fits. For production traffic you generally want the next tier up, and dedicated vCPU if the workload is CPU-bound rather than idle-waiting.
| Use case | Plan | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Fits the stack | 2 GiB, 1 vCPU shared | $13 |
| Comfortable, room for your own apps | 2 GiB, 2 vCPU shared | $19 |
| Dedicated vCPU (production) | 4 GiB, 2 vCPU dedicated | $43 |
2 GiB handles serious ingest for a single-team workload; compression keeps the 20 GB volume going far longer than raw Postgres would. Scale RAM with active chunk working set.
Run TimescaleDB yourself
The compose file is open source and runs locally with docker compose up. One step to deploy it to
Miget on the $13/month plan, databases included.