Best offer on record: 30-day free trial with $400 in credits (new Cloud orgs, incl. Continuum). 4 verified findings, checked 2026-10-22.
Offers
30-day free trial with $400 in credits (new Cloud orgs, incl. Continuum) high confidence
Every new CockroachDB Cloud organization gets a 30-day trial with $400 in credits; all usage (compute, storage, backups, data transfer, add-ons) draws down the $400 pool. Trial ends at 30 days or when the credit is exhausted, whichever first. New organizations created on/after Sep 15, 2026 land on the new 'Cockroach Continuum' pricing (Standard and Mission Critical editions, billed per vCPU-hour: Standard from $0.057/vCPU-hr on shared infra, 99.99% SLA; Mission Critical from $0.162/vCPU-hr on dedicated infra, 99.999% SLA). After the trial, clusters pause; a 30-day grace period follows (throttled, config changes restricted) during which adding a payment method restores clusters; after that, all clusters are permanently deleted and cannot be restored. Email milestones to Org Admins/Billing Coordinators at 50% and 75% credit consumption, trial end, <24h and grace end.
Eligibility
Only a user's FIRST organization qualifies; users invited to an organization do not get additional credits; organizations billed by invoice are excluded. No .edu or startup eligibility involved. No credit card required to start on the Standard edition (legacy Basic/Standard plans also card-free); Mission Critical REQUIRES a credit card because it runs on dedicated infrastructure. Region/provider limits on the card-free tier: Standard is AWS/GCP only (shared infra); Mission Critical adds Azure. No .edu requirement.
How to claim
1) Sign up at cockroachlabs.com (cloud console) — 'Create a free Continuum Cloud organization'. 2) The $400 trial credit is applied automatically to the new organization (no coupon or form). 3) Deploy a cluster (Standard edition = no credit card). 4) Optionally add a payment method (console, or via AWS/Google Cloud Marketplace) before the trial ends to keep running.
Expiry
Trial: 30 days or $400 exhaustion, whichever is first; then 30-day grace period, then deletion. One trial per user's first organization only; does not renew.
Gotchas
Trial vs free tier: this is a one-time credit, not a perpetual free tier; it ends when EITHER 30 days pass or $400 is used. Standard: no CC needed; Mission Critical: CC required. Data/egress: same-region traffic between cluster nodes is free; cross-region and public-internet egress are billed at the cloud provider's list price and will consume the $400. After grace period, cluster deletion is irreversible. New deployments after Sep 15, 2026 are on Continuum pricing, not the legacy RU plans.
Basic plan free tier: 50M RUs + 10 GiB storage free per month (~$15/month free resource credit) — legacy CockroachDB Cloud plans medium confidence
The Basic plan starts at $0/month and includes 50 million Request Units and 10 GiB of storage free every month; on-demand compute/storage scale to zero. Billing docs describe the same benefit as the first $15 of monthly resource consumption 'credited back on the monthly invoice'. Basic targets smaller/bursty workloads up to ~30K RU/sec (~60 vCPUs), multi-region on AWS & GCP (select regions), 99.99% SLA. This is the only recurring free tier in the product line.
Eligibility
Applies to pay-as-you-go CockroachDB Cloud organizations; customers on annual or multi-year contracts are explicitly NOT eligible for the monthly free resource benefit. A payment method (credit card or cloud Marketplace subscription) must be on the account to receive the free credit. CAVEAT as of 2026-10-22: the RU-based plan pages state these prices 'apply to pay-as-you-go and committed-use customers with clusters created prior to September 15, 2026' and 'Such pricing is no longer available for purchase' — new orgs get Cockroach Continuum, which lists no free tier. So the free tier is effectively live only for pre-cutover / existing pay-as-you-go orgs.
How to claim
Sign up for CockroachDB Cloud pay-as-you-go, add a payment method in the console (or subscribe via AWS/Google Cloud Marketplace), deploy on the Basic plan; the first 50M RUs + 10 GiB each month are credited back on the invoice automatically. No coupon needed.
Expiry
Ongoing while the Basic plan is active for pay-as-you-go orgs; effectively sunset for new customers at the Sep 15, 2026 Continuum cutover.
Gotchas
Credit is monthly, not cumulative; it is a credit-back on invoice, not a hard cap — going over costs money, and a payment method is required to get the benefit at all. Annual-contract customers lose it. Under the Sep 15, 2026 cutover to Continuum this plan structure is no longer available for new purchases, so its practical value in 2026 is limited to existing pay-as-you-go orgs. Backups on Basic are daily and not configurable; IOPS and data transfer are bundled into RUs.
Since Nov 18, 2024 (v24.3 and later major series), the CockroachDB server is no longer MIT-licensed: it ships under the proprietary 'CockroachDB Software License' (CSL), a key-gated license. The CSL permits use without a paid License Key only for 'Limited Non-Production Use' (design, prototyping, testing, development in non-production environments) or a database running solely on a single node. Multi-node production self-hosting requires a purchased License Key. Older releases remain available under their original licenses (MIT), so a genuinely free production-grade self-hosted path still exists for those versions.
Eligibility
Anyone (no .edu, no CC); the free carve-out covers non-production use of any size and single-node production. Region limits: none (self-hosted).
How to claim
1) Download a legacy MIT-licensed release (pre-Nov 2024, e.g. v24.2-series) for free production self-hosting, or 2) download the current v24.3+ build for free development/testing or single-node use; no registration or key needed for the carve-out. For multi-node production on current releases, purchase a License Key from Cockroach Labs.
Gotchas
The license text forbids operating multi-node production without a key, restricts benchmarking, mandates telemetry unless a key disables it, and is non-sublicensable/non-transferable. This is a 2024 license change, not a trial: it is a permanent free tier for non-production/single-node use, not a dollar credit and it covers no managed service or support. If you need the latest release in production, budget for the key.
Startup program / education license: verified absent high confidence
No startup-credits program and no education (student/.edu/academic) free-license program was found on the official site as of 2026-10-22. /startup-program/ and /company/startup-program/ return 404; /resources/startup/ redirects to the homepage; /education/ is 404; the marketing sitemap (scanned in full today) contains no 'education', 'student', 'academic' or startup-program URLs — only marketing blog posts/webinars and a free 'Unicorn Lessons' architecture ebook for startups (no credits or discount). The 'education-first' blog is a customer case study, not a program. 'CockroachDB University' (free training, launched Nov 2019) is still referenced in the site footer at learn.cockroachlabs.com (fetch bot-blocked, HTTP 403); even when active it was free education/training only, with no free Cloud license or credits for students or educators.
Eligibility
N/A — no offer to claim.
How to claim
Nothing to claim; the only free access for students/startups is the generic 30-day/$400 trial and (for pre-cutover orgs) the Basic free tier.
Gotchas
Absence verified via official 404s/redirects and a full marketing-sitemap scan today, but the session's web-search budget was exhausted, so I could not cross-check press releases or partner pages for an off-site program. Startup/education deals, if any, would come only via sales (account team), not public self-serve claims.
1) Sep 15, 2026 cutover: Cockroach Labs moved new deployments to 'Cockroach Continuum' (Standard/Mission Critical editions, per-vCPU-hour pricing). The legacy RU plans (including the $0/month Basic free tier with 50M RUs + 10 GiB free monthly) are 'no longer available for purchase' for new orgs; existing customers stay on old pricing unless they opt in. Continuum lists no recurring free tier — only the one-time 30-day/$400 trial. 2) Nov 18, 2024 relicensing: CockroachDB server moved from MIT to the proprietary, key-gated CockroachDB Software License (v24.3+); free self-hosting is now limited to non-production use or single-node deployments, while pre-Nov-2024 releases remain MIT. 3) Sep 26, 2024: the old 'Serverless'/'Dedicated' product names (which carried the original 'free for everybody, scales to zero' serverless framing) were absorbed into CockroachDB Cloud, per a reader's note on the serverless blog post. 4) No startup program and no education license are publicly offered today; Cockroach University (free training) is still footer-linked but bot-blocked (403) and never included a free database license. 5) WebSearch was unavailable this session (shared budget exhausted), so verification was done against official pages fetched 2026-10-22 (marketing pricing, docs.cockroachlabs.com, GitHub LICENSE) rather than press/news coverage of 2025-2026 changes.