What Does Turbopuffer Cost in Production?
Turbopuffer bills four meters, all usage-based: writes at $2.00 per logical GB, query scans at $0.001 per TB, query results at $0.05 per GB returned, and storage at roughly $0.33 per logical GB-month (discounted rates). There are no instance sizes or cluster tiers. Running 133M+ vectors in production, our invoices land between $1,034 and $1,394 a month — the same workload cost ~$10,000/month on MongoDB Atlas.
Our actual invoices (133M+ vectors, moderate QPS)
| Line item | April 2026 | May 2026 | June 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Writes ($2.00/GB logical) | $869.36 | $218.84 | $456.00 |
| Queries — scanned ($0.001/TB) | $103.38 | $1,309.29 | $715.59 |
| Queries — returned ($0.05/GB) | $8.96 | $80.43 | $26.35 |
| Storage (~$0.33/GB-mo logical) | $52.46 | $148.99 | $196.43 |
| Total (gross) | $1,034.16 | $1,757.55 | $1,394.37 |
Three things the bills teach:
- Storage is nearly free. ~600 GB of logical data costs under $200/month. We have never discussed deleting data to save money.
- Scans are the variable line, and they're cheap at absurd scale. In May we scanned over 1.3 exabytes (1,309,290 TB) running corpus-wide batch work — for $1,309. On a provisioned database that month would have been a capacity-planning project.
- Writes are a one-time tax per byte. Batch your ingest; the $2/GB meter is on logical GB written.
Turbopuffer also sells pre-purchase credits at a discount (our May net was $1,245.55 after credits) and applies 50% batch discounts on writes over 3MB.
When the math works
The pricing model is object-storage-first: you pay for what moves, not for capacity that sits provisioned at peak. It fits large, growing corpora with bursty or moderate query load. Under a few million vectors, pgvector on your existing Postgres is fine and this math doesn't matter yet.
Full migration story: 133 Million Chunks.