Turso Has a Free Distributed SQLite — Here's Why It's the Database Edge Computing Needed

SQLite is great but local-only. Turso makes SQLite distributed, replicated, and edge-ready — with a generous free tier.

What is Turso?

Turso is a distributed database built on libSQL (an open-source fork of SQLite). It gives you SQLite's simplicity with edge replication and multi-tenancy.

Free Tier

• 9 GB total storage
• 500 databases
• 25 billion row reads/month
• 100 million row writes/month
• 3 locations

Quick Start

# Install CLI
brew install tursodatabase/tap/turso

# Login
turso auth login

# Create database
turso db create my-app

# Get connection URL
turso db show my-app --url
turso db tokens create my-app

Connect from TypeScript

bun add @libsql/client

import { createClient } from "@libsql/client";

const db = createClient({
  url: process.env.TURSO_URL!,
  authToken: process.env.TURSO_TOKEN!,
});

// Create table
await db.execute(`
  CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS users (
    id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT,
    name TEXT NOT NULL,
    email TEXT UNIQUE NOT NULL,
    created_at DATETIME DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
  )
`);

// Insert
await db.execute({
  sql: "INSERT INTO users (name, email) VALUES (?, ?)",
  args: ["Alice", "[e-mail]"],
});

// Query
const result = await db.execute("SELECT * FROM users");
for (const row of result.rows) {
  console.log(row.name, row.email);
}

// Batch (transaction)
await db.batch([
  { sql: "INSERT INTO users (name, email) VALUES (?, ?)", args: ["Bob", "[e-mail]"] },
  { sql: "INSERT INTO users (name, email) VALUES (?, ?)", args: ["Carol", "[e-mail]"] },
], "write");

With Drizzle ORM

import { drizzle } from "drizzle-orm/libsql";
import { createClient } from "@libsql/client";

const client = createClient({
  url: process.env.TURSO_URL!,
  authToken: process.env.TURSO_TOKEN!,
});

const db = drizzle(client);

Embedded Replicas (Offline-First)

import { createClient } from "@libsql/client";

const db = createClient({
  url: "file:local-replica.db",
  syncUrl: process.env.TURSO_URL!,
  authToken: process.env.TURSO_TOKEN!,
});

// Reads are instant (local SQLite)
const users = await db.execute("SELECT * FROM users");

// Sync with remote when ready
await db.sync();

This gives you local-first reads with cloud sync. Perfect for edge computing.

Multi-Tenant (Database per Tenant)

# Create a database for each tenant
turso db create tenant-acme --group default
turso db create tenant-globex --group default

With 500 free databases, you can have 500 tenants on the free tier.

Turso vs Alternatives

Feature	Turso	Neon	PlanetScale	D1
Engine	libSQL (SQLite)	PostgreSQL	MySQL	SQLite
Edge Replicas	Yes	No	No	Yes
Embedded	Yes	No	No	No
Multi-tenant	500 DBs free	1 project	1 DB	Unlimited
Offline-first	Yes	No	No	No

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Need to populate your database with web data? Check out my Apify actors — scrape and load data into Turso. For custom solutions, email [e-mail].