Manage Spending Limit for TiDB Cloud Starter Instances

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 instances.

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

Usage quota

For the first five TiDB Cloud Starter instances 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 TiDB Cloud Starter instance 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 TiDB Cloud Starter instance exceeds 5 GiB for a free TiDB Cloud Starter instance, the TiDB Cloud Starter instance 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 instance with an additional quota, you can edit the spending limit on the TiDB Cloud Starter instance creation page. For more information, see Create a TiDB Cloud Starter instance.

Update spending limit

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

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

1. On the My TiDB page, click the name of your target TiDB Cloud Starter instance to go to its overview page.

   Tip

   If you are in multiple organizations, use the combo box in the upper-left corner to switch to your target organization first.

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.