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Databases have struggled to keep up with the speed of AI-enabled software development. Across the engineering and platform teams we talk to, we see coding agents stalled by slow database provisioning, CI/CD test pipelines bottlenecked by complexity, and internal apps hitting a wall as they transition from sandbox to production. Until now, no PostgreSQL service in the market has combined agent-ready capabilities with uncompromised enterprise security and scale.

To solve this, we are excited to announce the preview of AlloyDB Express, a new offering of AlloyDB for PostgreSQL designed specifically for developers and AI coding agents. Capable of spinning up in seconds and automatically pausing when idle, it helps bridge the gap between rapid, AI-driven development and robust enterprise infrastructure.The result is a highly secure, cost-effective database environment that accelerates how you build applications and can easily grow to production scale. Get started with the free tier and pay only for what you use. 

AlloyDB Express is an agent-ready database that gives you:

  • Database creation in under two seconds: Create a ready-to-use PostgreSQL database in under two seconds using gcloud CLI, REST API, MCP, Terraform or Console.

  • Scale-to-zero: Your database automatically pauses after 15 minutes of inactivity so you do not incur costs for compute while it is idle. When a new query arrives, it wakes up automatically in seconds.

  • Enterprise-ready with built-in AI and security: Access enterprise AI capabilities including vector, text, and hybrid search to quickly build AI applications, all protected by built-in enterprise security guardrails.

  • Start for free and pay only for what you use: Get started with our free monthly allowance and as you scale, pay only for what you use.

  • One-click upgrade to production scale: When your app is ready for production, upgrade your existing database to AlloyDB in one click—keeping data, schemas, users, and connection strings intact while gaining enterprise high availability (HA), read replicas, and disaster recovery (DR).

Accelerate development without compromising security

AlloyDB Express combines self-service speed with built-in enterprise security. For app builders and coding agents this means you can instantly provision fully isolated PostgreSQL databases without manual setup, allowing every test and prototype to run in its own dedicated database. And for platform and security administrators you define IAM, network, and organization policies centrally once, and every AlloyDB Express database created by a developer or coding agent automatically stays within your company’s security guardrails.

Whether code is written by developers or AI agents, security remains enforced through built-in protection mechanisms which:

  • Minimize exposure with safe default connections: Keep your data hidden from the public internet using public DNS endpoints that mask IP addresses and block incoming traffic until explicitly allowed.

  • Secure internal integrations via private VPC networking: Safely connect your internal workloads using Private Service Connect (PSC) or private DNS.

  • Enforce least privilege with granular access controls: Confidently restrict agent and user permissions utilizing Google Cloud IAM, VPC Service Controls, and native PostgreSQL roles.

AlloyDB Express brings built-in AI capabilities

Unlike databases that rely on external vector stores or complex setups, AlloyDB Express embeds enterprise AI tools directly into your database, so you can focus on building features.  You can accelerate your AI application development, with tools like:

  • Fast vector search (pgvector HNSW and Google’s ScaNN index): Store and search vector embeddings alongside your operational data for semantic search, recommendation engines, and agent memory (RAG) — without syncing data to a separate vector database.

  • Direct access to Gemini models within SQL queries: Generate text or image embeddings on the fly and run semantic filtering, ranking, and summarization (ai.if, ai.rank, ai.generate) directly inside standard SELECT and INSERT statements.

  • Natural language-to-SQL generation: Let developers and AI agents ask questions in plain English to generate, run, and refine queries in seconds using built-in AlloyDB Studio and natural language APIs.

Start with the free tier and pay only for what you use

AlloyDB Express offers simple intuitive pricing and scales to zero when inactive. Data stays safe, and the database wakes up instantly when a new query arrives.Here is a short summary of our pricing:

  • Active compute: $0.115 per Compute Unit hour (CU-hr), billed by the second.

  • Paused compute: $0.00 per hour when idle for more than 15 mins.

  • Used storage: $0.30 per GB-month, billed only for the disk space your data actually uses.

In addition, Google Cloud offers a free tier, making it easier to get started with 50 free CUs every month. For more details see the AlloyDB Express pricing.

Get started today

AlloyDB Express is available today in preview. Try it in the Google Cloud console or read the AlloyDB Express documentation page for more details on how to get started.