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Cockroach Continuum offers CockroachDB in editions, cluster plans that set infrastructure, availability, and feature boundaries. Add-ons enable additional capabilities on a cluster. There is no separate purchase step for an add-on: when you use an add-on feature, it appears as a line item on your bill for the time it’s active.

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Editions

The editions differ first in infrastructure. Shared infrastructure serves clusters from multiple organizations. Dedicated infrastructure is provisioned for a single cluster. Continuum offers two editions:
  • Standard runs production workloads on shared infrastructure, in single-region or multi-region configurations, with usage-based storage billing and a 99.99% availability SLA.
  • Mission Critical runs on dedicated infrastructure for workloads that need the highest availability and the full security feature set, with a 99.999% SLA for multi-region configurations and region-level resiliency options. Single-region Mission Critical clusters choose usage-based or provisioned storage at creation.
You choose an edition when you create a cluster, and the choice is permanent for that cluster: to change editions, you create a new cluster and move the workload.

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Choose an edition

Choose Standard for workloads that tolerate shared infrastructure and do not need features available only on Mission Critical clusters, such as CMEK or physical cluster replication. Choose Mission Critical for Tier 0 and regulated workloads, for the strictest recovery objectives, and for any cluster that will host virtual clusters.

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Feature reference

To view CockroachDB feature availability by edition and on virtual clusters, refer to Feature Reference.

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Add-ons

Add-ons are not installed or enabled separately. Creating a host cluster, starting physical replication, or creating a changefeed to a sink starts the add-on charge, and stopping use stops it. Add-ons are scoped to the cluster that uses them, with one exception noted in the below table.

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Feature entitlements and license behavior

Feature boundaries are enforced by the database itself through license entitlements. If a statement requires a feature your cluster’s plan does not include, it fails with an error of the following form:
Enforcement behavior:
  • Physical cluster replication is checked on both the source and the destination cluster.
  • Logical data replication requires the entitlement on both clusters.
  • Changefeeds to sinks are gated. Sinkless changefeeds are not.
  • The feature.changefeed.enabled cluster setting is an independent operator control and is unrelated to license entitlements.
  • Several license-gateable features are deliberately included on Standard for PostgreSQL compatibility, including point-in-time restore, row-level security, column-level encryption, changefeeds, and EXPORT.
  • Clusters without a new-format license, and clusters on older CockroachDB versions, are not subject to entitlement enforcement.

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Billing and metering

Continuum bills in credits. Compute is metered in vCPU-hours. Storage charges depend on the edition and storage model. Standard clusters use usage-based storage billing. Plenum-backed Mission Critical clusters are billed for physical data stored, while provisioned Mission Critical clusters are billed for provisioned capacity. Network and backup storage costs are passed through from the cloud provider based on usage. Add-on charges appear as separate line items on the clusters that use them, for the time the feature is active. An add-on’s charge is a multiplier on the compute rate, applied to the vCPU-hours during which the feature is active. The base compute and each add-on appear as their own invoice lines, so the charge tracks when the feature was in use. Marketplace billing through AWS and GCP is supported, and new organizations receive free trial credits. For rates, refer to Pricing.