Manage Spending Limit for TiDB Cloud Starter Clusters

Spending limit refers to the maximum amount of money that you are willing to spend on a particular workload in a month. It is a cost-control mechanism that allows you to set a budget for your TiDB Cloud Starter clusters.

For each organization in TiDB Cloud, you can create a maximum of five free TiDB Cloud Starter clusters by default. To create more TiDB Cloud Starter clusters, you need to add a credit card and set a monthly spending limit for the usage. But if you delete some of your previous clusters before creating more, the new cluster can still be created without a credit card.

Usage quota

For the first five TiDB Cloud Starter clusters in your organization, whether they are free or scalable, TiDB Cloud provides a free usage quota for each of them as follows:

• Row-based storage: 5 GiB
• Columnar storage: 5 GiB
• Request Units (RUs): 50 million RUs per month

Once a cluster reaches its usage quota, it immediately denies any new connection attempts until you increase the quota or the usage is reset upon the start of a new month. Existing connections established before reaching the quota will remain active but will experience throttling. For example, when the row-based storage of a cluster exceeds 5 GiB for a free cluster, the cluster automatically restricts any new connection attempts.

To learn more about the RU consumption of different resources (including read, write, SQL CPU, and network egress), the pricing details, and the throttled information, see TiDB Cloud Starter Pricing Details.

If you want to create a TiDB Cloud Starter cluster with an additional quota, you can edit the spending limit on the cluster creation page. For more information, see Create a TiDB Cloud Starter cluster.

Update spending limit

For a TiDB Cloud Starter free cluster, you can increase the usage quota by setting a monthly spending limit when creating the cluster. For an existing cluster, you can adjust the monthly spending limit directly.

To update the spending limit for a TiDB Cloud Starter cluster, perform the following steps:

1. On the Clusters page of your project, click the name of your target cluster to go to its overview page.

   Tip

   You can use the combo box in the upper-left corner to switch between organizations, projects, and clusters.

2. In the Capacity used this month area, click Set Spending Limit.

   If you have set the spending limit previously and want to update it, click Edit.

3. Edit the monthly spending limit as needed. If you have not added a payment method, you will need to add a credit card after editing the limit.

4. Click Update Spending Limit.