ClickPipes for PostgreSQL CDC billing

This section outlines the pricing model for our Postgres Change Data Capture (CDC) connector in ClickPipes. In designing this model, our goal was to keep pricing highly competitive while staying true to our core vision:

Making it seamless and affordable for customers to move data from Postgres to ClickHouse for real-time analytics.

The connector is over 5x more cost-effective than external ETL tools and similar features in other database platforms.

Note

Pricing will start being metered in monthly bills beginning September 1st, 2025, for all customers (both existing and new) using Postgres CDC ClickPipes. Until then, usage is free. Customers have a 3-month window starting May 29 (GA announcement) to review and optimize their costs if needed, although we expect most will not need to make any changes.

Pricing dimensions

There are two main dimensions to pricing:

1. Ingested Data: The raw, uncompressed bytes coming from Postgres and ingested into ClickHouse.
2. Compute: The compute units provisioned per service manage multiple Postgres CDC ClickPipes and are separate from the compute units used by the ClickHouse Cloud service. This additional compute is dedicated specifically to Postgres CDC ClickPipes. Compute is billed at the service level, not per individual pipe. Each compute unit includes 2 vCPUs and 8 GB of RAM.

Ingested data

The Postgres CDC connector operates in two main phases:

• Initial load / resync: This captures a full snapshot of Postgres tables and occurs when a pipe is first created or re-synced.
• Continuous Replication (CDC): Ongoing replication of changes—such as inserts, updates, deletes, and schema changes—from Postgres to ClickHouse.

In most use cases, continuous replication accounts for over 90% of a ClickPipe life cycle. Because initial loads involve transferring a large volume of data all at once, we offer a lower rate for that phase.

Phase	Cost
Initial load / resync	$0.10 per GB
Continuous Replication (CDC)	$0.20 per GB

Compute

This dimension covers the compute units provisioned per service just for Postgres ClickPipes. Compute is shared across all Postgres pipes within a service. It is provisioned when the first Postgres pipe is created and deallocated when no Postgres CDC pipes remain. The amount of compute provisioned depends on your organization's tier:

Tier	Cost
Basic Tier	0.5 compute unit per service — $0.10 per hour
Scale or Enterprise Tier	1 compute unit per service — $0.20 per hour

Example

Let's say your service is in Scale tier and has the following setup:

• 2 Postgres ClickPipes running continuous replication
• Each pipe ingests 500 GB of data changes (CDC) per month
• When the first pipe is kicked off, the service provisions 1 compute unit under the Scale Tier for Postgres CDC

Monthly cost breakdown

Ingested Data (CDC):

$2 \text{ pipes} \times 500 \text{ GB} = 1,000 \text{ GB per month}$

$1,000 \text{ GB} \times \$0.20/\text{GB} = \$200$

Compute:

$1 \text{ compute unit} \times \$0.20/\text{hr} \times 730 \text{ hours (approximate month)} = \$146$

Note

Compute is shared across both pipes

Total Monthly Cost:

$\$200 \text{ (ingest)} + \$146 \text{ (compute)} = \$346$