Start for Free, Scale as You Grow with Prisma Postgres

Each action you perform, whether it’s a create, read, update, or delete query against your Prisma Postgres database counts as a single operation. Even if Prisma issues multiple database queries behind the scenes to fulfill your request, it’s still billed as one operation.

By treating simple lookups and complex queries the same, you can directly correlate your database usage and costs with your product usage and user behavior. There’s no need to track write-heavy workloads or worry about bandwidth per operation: each of them is counted and billed the same, making your usage and budgeting simple and straightforward. You can learn more about our operations-based pricing model in our blog post.

While the answer to this question will vary from project to project, there are a couple of ways to get an idea of what you will need:

• If you already have a database with another provider, you can often look in their dashboard to see your current usage. The number of queries will be a good hint to the approximate number of operations you’ll use.
• If you already use the Prisma ORM, you can enable the metrics feature to begin tracking your usage, which is an easy and accurate way to see your current usage.
• If you’re starting a new project, we encourage you to just get started and see how many queries you typically use. We offer a free threshold of 100,000 operations per month, meaning you can confidently get started without paying anything. From our experience, 100,000 operations per month is more than enough to get started with a project and serve your first users.

You can find an example calculation for a medium-sized workload in our blog post about our operations-based pricing model.

We include a free threshold of 100,000 database operations per month on all plans, meaning you can use Prisma for free, and only pay if you exceed the threshold. From our experience, 100,000 operations per month is more than enough to get started.

We always send usage notifications to let you know when you’re approaching the threshold, so that you’re always in control of your spending.

Yes, you can set limits to ensure you never get a surprise bill. We’ll send you alerts when you reach 75% of your set limit, and if you reach 100% we’ll pause access to your database. This ensures you’ll never have an unexpected bill, and you can always be in complete control of your spending.

We record usage at the account level because it gives you, the developer, the most flexibility. You can spin up one database or 20 databases without any extra cost — pay only for the operations you make and storage you use across all of them.

This makes experimenting, prototyping and testing ideas super easy and seamless, because you don't have to think about how many databases you create.

Traditional pricing is where you choose a fixed database size and price, and the amount you pay is generally predictable. But that comes at the expense of flexibility, meaning it’s much harder to scale up and down with your application’s demands. This is usually fine for a small test database, but for production workloads, it can be burdensome: If you have low-traffic periods, and high-traffic periods (most production apps do) then you either under-provision and risk having downtime in busy periods, or you over-provision and pay a lot more for your database.

With usage pricing, you only pay for what you need, when you need it. If your app has a quiet period, you’ll pay less. If things get busy, we can simply scale up to handle it for you. Prisma Postgres comes with budget controls, so you can always stay in control of your spending, while taking advantage of the flexibility. You can learn more on why operations-based pricing is better in our blog post.

Prisma’s pricing is designed to provide maximum flexibility to developers, while aiming to be as intuitive as possible.

We charge primarily by operation, which is counted each time you invoke the Prisma ORM client to create, read, update or delete a record. Additionally we also charge for storage. All with a very generous free threshold each month.

We don’t charge by data transfer (bandwidth) or by compute/memory hours, simply because we felt that these metrics are more difficult to grasp as a developer.

We created a pricing model to more closely match how you use your database as a developer, not how the infrastructure works. You can learn more about our approach to an operations-based database pricing model in this blog post.

Because we only charge you for what you actually use, the best way to see a comparison is to run your application on Prisma, and that’s why we offer a free threshold every month.

However, as a simple comparison, the average database operation size from current Prisma users is 10kb (measured from over 15b queries). Some providers charge by bandwidth used, meaning 5GB of bandwidth might equate to approximately 500,000 database operations.

You can also connect your own database to Prisma's global caching and connection pooling, also known as Prisma Accelerate.

Click the "Bring your own database" toggle at the top of this page to see more
detail.

Our pricing is expressed per million, however if you just use one operation (past the free threshold), you will only pay for what you actually use.

For example, one database operation on the Pro plan ($8/million operations) would cost $0.000008.

Building a startup is hard. Prisma helps you stay laser-focused on what matters the most, which is building features and winning users.

We offer $10k in credits to eligible startups. Learn more at prisma.io/startups.