Electric Cloud now has self-serve pricing. Sign up, pick a plan, start building — no sales call needed.
Pricing is usage-based: you pay for writes and retention. Data delivery — reads, fan-out, concurrent users — is free, unlimited, and always will be. Pay as you go (PAYG) waives bills under $5/month, giving you 5 million writes per month at zero cost. Most hobby and simple production apps will run for free forever.
Electric Cloud has been running production workloads since the public beta — long enough to be confident in the platform's reliability and cost structure. We know many teams need published pricing before they commit. Now it's here.
How pricing works
The model
Two billing dimensions: writes and retention.
- $1 per million writes to any stream. Each write covers up to 10KB; larger messages auto-chunk and each chunk counts as a write.
- $0.10 per GB-month retention.
- No charge for reads, fan-out, concurrent users, connections, or data delivery.
Some services that run additional infrastructure carry a service cost on top of the base write rate. Postgres Sync runs a dedicated replication engine to filter changes and match them to shapes, adding $2 per million writes emitted to the shape log from the replication stream. You're charged for the filtered output, not the raw replication input — one Postgres change landing on 100 shapes = 100 writes.
See the pricing page for the full breakdown and worked examples.
The tiers
- Pay as you go — $0/month. No commitment, no credit card required. Bills under $5/month waived.
- Pro — $249/month. No commitment. 10% usage discount. The monthly fee acts as prepaid usage credit — you're not paying twice. Unlocks advanced features including hosted sub-queries for Postgres Sync and premium support.
- Scale — $1,999/month (6-month commitment). 20% usage discount. Same prepaid credit model. Direct access to founders and hands-on support to accelerate your time to market.
Why reads are free
Electric delivers data through CDN infrastructure. Caching and request-collapsing handle concurrency at the edge, so reads never hit origin.
Your costs scale with writes, not users or traffic. A stream with 10 readers costs the same as one with 10,000.
What it costs in practice
AI chat app with token streams
Assumptions: 1,000 MAU, ~30 conversations per user per month, AI responses streamed as ~50 writes each (~500 tokens chunked at ~10 tokens per write).
- Writes: 1,000 × 30 × 50 = 1.5M writes/month
- Retention: ~1GB of stream history → $0.10
- Total: ~$1.60/month → waived on PAYG
At 10,000 MAU that's ~15M writes, $15/month. At 100,000 MAU, ~150M writes. On Pro with the 10% discount, $135/month — covered by the $249 prepaid credit.
All the users reading those streams cost nothing. 100 users or 100,000 on the same stream, same price.
Real-time SaaS dashboard with Postgres Sync
Assumptions: 500 active users on a project management-style dashboard, syncing a handful of shapes each.
- Initial shape loads are served from CDN cache after the first request — reads are free.
- Database changes: 50,000 row changes/month, average change matches 10 shapes = 500,000 emitted writes.
- Replication cost: 500K writes × $3/M ($1 base + $2 Postgres Sync) = $1.50
- Writes from initial sync and subset queries (~2K rows per shape across 500 users): ~1M rows → $1.00
- Retention: ~2GB → $0.20
- Total: ~$2.70/month → waived on PAYG
You're only charged for what gets emitted after filtering — a change that matches zero shapes costs nothing.
Get started
Sign up at Electric Cloud. Start on PAYG, free below $5, no credit card required. See the full details on the pricing page, including a calculator to model your workload.
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