Databases are very expensive. In fact, they are one of the most expensive parts of any infrastructure operation. That’s why conventional thinking ce

Databases will be free

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2025-01-09 04:00:03

Databases are very expensive. In fact, they are one of the most expensive parts of any infrastructure operation. That’s why conventional thinking centers on the use of a single large monolithic database accessed by many clients - it’s the only scalable way to do it.

I firmly believe that in a not too distant future, their cost will drop down to the point individual databases will be essentially free, and that conventional database infrastructure models will flip on their heads - towards a microdatabase approach. This is a future that was taking shape already, but was accelerated by the rise of AI agents that need thousands of ephemeral (disposable) databases at scale for what is known as agentic memory.

With a strong belief in this future, our internal mission at Turso has been to drive the cost of a database to zero. This north star is what drives investment initiatives like our Deterministic Simulation Testing framework for massive multitenancy.

In this article, I will discuss the trends supporting this future, their consequences, and use cases free databases in potentially limitless numbers enable.