HeliosDB pricing depends on the edition. HeliosDB Nano and HeliosProxy are free to self-host under Apache 2.0, and managed Nano Cloud is in an Experimental Period in which every plan, Free, Starter and Pro, costs $0/mo for every customer. HeliosDB Lite self-hosted licensing is quoted by sales, and HeliosDB Full is custom-priced on an annual contract; both are licensed SSPL-1.0.
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Use the interactive configurator below to model how much your organization currently spends across multi-vendor database licenses, CDC/ETL pipelines, and DBA administration, and see which HeliosDB edition maximizes your 3-year ROI.
Embedded database with full SQL, vector search, and PostgreSQL compatibility. Available as Cloud managed service.
Free for every customer during the Experimental Period. Business email for console accounts, no trial.
The shared SQL core, vector search, branching and time travel, plus HeliosProxy and HeliosCore. Connection pooling, load balancing, and advanced routing.
Enterprise platform with PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle and Redis listeners plus an HTTP gateway with vector stores and agent memory. GPU acceleration (NVIDIA CUDA) in builds on request; in-database ML, clustering and multi-primary replication are planned.
Nothing during the current Experimental Period. Nano Cloud, the managed service for HeliosDB Nano (HeliosDB Cloud), costs $0/mo on every plan for every customer: the limits below are indicative and not metered for billing, and no charge starts when the period ends unless you accept new paid terms. Accounts are for business email addresses only, and there is no trial of any kind.
| Feature | Free | Starter $0/mo | Pro $0/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Databases | 3 / 4 | 5 | 20 |
| Storage | 500 MB / 1 GB | 1 GB | 10 GB |
| Connections | 5 / 10 | 20 | 100 |
| Vector Storage | 50K / 100K | 100K | 1M |
| API Requests/mo | 50K / 100K | 100K | 1M |
| Time-Travel Retention | 7 / 14 days | 30 days | 90 days |
| Encryption | AES-256-GCM encryption at rest + zero-knowledge encryption | AES-256-GCM encryption at rest, all encryption modes | AES-256-GCM encryption at rest, all encryption modes |
| Uptime commitment | None on any plan; no service credits | ||
| Durability | Transaction Durability Commitment on every plan | ||
| Support | Best effort under the Support Policy; community channels for questions | ||
Free column: a Cloud account after email verification / after a product feedback session. Accounts that agents create through the BaaS API start at the Instant level below. All limits are indicative during the Experimental Period. Reference prices for after it, which apply only under new terms you accept expressly: Starter $9 and Pro $49 a month. An Enterprise plan and add-ons are not offered during the Experimental Period.
HeliosDB Cloud gives no availability or uptime commitment. It gives the Transaction Durability Commitment instead: a transaction the service has acknowledged as committed is not lost because of the version of the HeliosDB engine HeliosDB runs, including upgrades. HeliosDB Cloud does not route connections through HeliosProxy today; if it does, the commitment covers that too. It does not cover deletes made with your credentials, or hardware or site failures that destroy the data and all its copies, where a restore from the daily backup can lose up to about 24 hours of changes. One known limitation of the engine is excluded where its workaround is not used: statements outside an explicit transaction that read and change the same row from several sessions at once (such as UPDATE ... SET n = n + 1) can lose updates, so run them in an explicit transaction and retry when it reports a serialization failure. Terms: Cloud Terms of Service, Data Processing Agreement, Support Policy.
The Free plan has three levels. Accounts that agents and scripts create through the BaaS API start at the Instant level; verifying the email address and completing a product feedback session unlock the next two. Console accounts, and every account at the Verified level or above, are for a business email address (personal mailbox domains such as gmail.com, yahoo.com and outlook.com are not accepted for them); console accounts at cloud.heliosdb.com start at the Verified level once the email address is verified. An account created through the API may use any email address at the Instant level; with a personal mailbox address (such as gmail.com or outlook.com) the account is API-only: no console sign-in and no email verification, and it stays at the Instant level.
| Free level | Instant (API signup) | Verified | Feedback given |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unlock by | BaaS API signup | Verify email | Give feedback |
| Storage | 100 MB | 500 MB | 1 GB |
| Databases | 1 | 3 | 4 |
| Connections | 5 | 5 | 10 |
| Vectors | 10K | 50K | 100K |
| API Requests/mo | 10K | 50K | 100K |
| Time-Travel Retention | 7 days | 7 days | 14 days |
Provision instantly with a single quick-start API call. Explore the BaaS API →
All three editions share the SQL core and vector search (in Full through the HTTP vector-store API); Nano and Lite run time-travel queries and branches, which are planned for Full. Lite adds HeliosProxy and the HeliosCore storage engine, and Full adds the multi-protocol enterprise platform. The table compares Nano, Lite and Full at a high level. Database engine rows carry the statuses of the Release and Capability Matrix (Available, Available with limitations, In preview or Planned; a dash means the edition does not list the engine), each the best result that HeliosDB's tests or its own production use show on any version of the edition, so no release is named. They come from a draft of the matrix, which is informational until HeliosDB publishes a frozen version, and driver compatibility does not imply complete feature parity with the original database engine.
| Feature | Nano | Lite | Full |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core Database | |||
| Full SQL (DDL/DML/DQL) | |||
| ACID Transactions (MVCC) | |||
| JSONB Support | |||
| Time-Travel Queries | Planned | ||
| Database Branching | Planned | ||
| Database Engines (Release and Capability Matrix) | |||
| PostgreSQL wire protocol | Available with limitations | Available with limitations | Available with limitations |
| MySQL wire protocol | Available with limitations | Planned | Available with limitations |
| SQLite | — | Planned | — |
| Oracle | — | — | Available with limitations |
| Redis | — | — | In preview |
| Microsoft SQL Server | — | — | Planned |
| MongoDB | — | — | Planned |
| Apache Cassandra | — | — | Planned |
| Vector & AI | |||
| HNSW Vector Index | HTTP vector-store API; SQL indexes planned | ||
| Product Quantization | Planned | ||
| NL-to-SQL / AI Query | Planned | Planned | |
| GPU Acceleration | — | — | CUDA builds on request |
| AI-Native Retrieval | |||
CREATE EXTENSION hdb_code · SQL-callable LSP | Source build | Planned | Planned |
WITH CONTEXT SQL clause · Graph-RAG | Source build | Planned | Planned |
| Native MCP server (HTTP / WS / SSE; stdio via CodeKB MCP) | Source build | Planned | Planned |
| Eight ingestion adapters (incl. Docling: PDF / Office / audio / image) | Source build | Planned | Planned |
| In-process embedder (fastembed-rs + BGESmallENV15) | Source build | Planned | Planned |
helios_lsp_rename_apply · write-side refactor | Source build | Planned | Planned |
| Security & Encryption | |||
| AES-256-GCM TDE | Off until enabled with a key | Planned | |
| Zero-Knowledge Encryption | Planned | — | |
| FIPS 140-3 build mode | Opt-in build | Opt-in build | Planned |
| Row-Level Security | Embedded API / REPL; wire and REST planned | Planned | |
| SOC 2 / HIPAA Audit Toolkit | Planned | ||
| Infrastructure & High Availability | |||
| HeliosProxy (connection pooling, routing) | Works with (separate, Apache 2.0) | Bundled | Works with (separate, Apache 2.0) |
| HeliosCore (storage engine) | — | ||
| Streaming Replication | WAL streaming, warm standby | ha-tier1 build | Planned |
| HA / Failover | Warm standby, manual switchover | Warm standby (ha-tier1 build); automatic failover planned | Planned |
| Enterprise Platform (Full Only) | |||
| Distributed MVCC | — | — | Planned |
| 7 Foreign Data Wrappers | — | — | Planned |
| DocumentStore API (MongoDB-compatible) | — | — | Planned |
| Change Streams | — | — | Planned |
| Quantum-Inspired Optimization | — | — | Planned |
| AI & Automation (Add-ons) | |||
| AI Support | Add-on | Add-on | Add-on |
| AI-DBA Agent | — | Add-on | Add-on |
| Deployment | |||
| Embedded Library | — (server only) | ||
| Managed Cloud | Coming soon | Coming soon | |
| Self-Hosted Server | |||
AI Support is free on Cloud, with on-premises use through sales; the AI-DBA Agent for Lite and Full is sold through sales. Both add intelligent support or autonomous administration to your HeliosDB deployment.
AI-powered knowledge assistant trained on HeliosDB docs. Instant answers with ready-to-run SQL examples.
Autonomous database administration with proactive monitoring, self-healing, anomaly detection, and performance optimization.
It depends on the edition. Nano Cloud, the managed service, is in an Experimental Period in which every plan, Free, Starter and Pro, costs $0/mo for every customer. HeliosDB Nano and HeliosProxy are free to self-host under Apache 2.0, and Lite and Full are licensed through sales under the Customer Terms.
A console account, opened with a business email address (personal mailbox domains such as gmail.com, yahoo.com and outlook.com are not accepted for it), starts on the Free plan after email verification with 3 databases, 500 MB of storage, 5 connections, 50K vectors, 50K API requests a month and 7 days of time-travel retention; completing a product feedback session raises it to 4 databases, 1 GB, 10 connections, 100K vectors, 100K API requests and 14 days. Accounts that agents create through the BaaS API, with any email address, start at 1 database, 100 MB, 5 connections, 10K vectors and 10K API requests until a business email address is verified. Every level includes AES-256-GCM encryption at rest and zero-knowledge encryption.
Starter gives 5 databases, 1 GB of storage, 20 connections, 100K vectors and 100K API requests a month and 30-day time-travel retention. Pro gives 20 databases, 10 GB, 100 connections, 1M vectors and 1M requests, 90-day retention and a dedicated database file per organization. Both include all encryption modes, and both are free during the Experimental Period, with indicative limits.
No. HeliosDB Cloud has no trial of any kind, and no plan turns into a paid plan. During the Experimental Period every plan, Starter and Pro included, is free for every customer; HeliosDB gives at least 30 days’ notice before the period ends, and paid plans then start only under new terms you accept expressly (Cloud Terms).
During the Experimental Period no add-ons and no Enterprise plan are offered, and plan limits are indicative: HeliosDB may enforce or change them to keep the shared service stable. If your workload needs more than Pro provides, write to HeliosDB support.
Yes. HeliosDB Nano is licensed Apache 2.0, a permissive open-source license, so you can run the embedded library or the self-hosted server on your own infrastructure at no cost. HeliosProxy is also Apache 2.0. Nano Cloud plans are for the managed service, which is free during its Experimental Period.
Both are source-available under SSPL-1.0 and licensed through sales. Lite is sold as self-hosted licensing quoted by HeliosDB sales, and Full has custom pricing on an annual contract, both under the Customer Terms. A managed cloud service for Lite and Full is listed as coming soon.
Yes. AI Support, the assistant trained on HeliosDB documentation, is free on Cloud and available for every edition; on-premises use is through sales. The AI-DBA Agent, for autonomous database administration, is available for Lite and Full through sales.
No. HeliosDB Cloud gives no availability or uptime commitment and no service credits on any plan. It gives the Transaction Durability Commitment instead: a transaction the service has acknowledged as committed is not lost because of the version of the HeliosDB engine HeliosDB runs, including upgrades. HeliosDB Cloud does not route connections through HeliosProxy today; if it does, the commitment covers that too. Support is best effort under the Support Policy.
Start free with Nano Cloud or contact us for Lite and Full edition licensing.