turso

Turso is a from-scratch rewrite of SQLite in Rust, compatible at the SQL and file-format level but built on a modern architecture with memory safety and concurrent writes. This is the project that used to be called Limbo. It is now the company's main direction, MIT licensed, and you can embed it in your app the way you would regular SQLite.

Worth being clear about the moving parts, because the naming confuses everyone. Turso Database, this repository, is the new Rust engine. It has not declared 1.0 and is moving fast, but it runs in production today, including behind Turso Cloud. libSQL is the company's older C fork of SQLite and has been battle-tested longer. Both are live; the Rust engine is simply where the development effort goes now. Until 1.0 lands, the team's own advice applies: keep independent backups, the way you would with any database.

The engine is free and you can self-host it for nothing. Turso Cloud is the managed side, and the ladder climbs fast. Free covers 100 databases, 5GB of storage, 500 million row reads and 10 million row writes a month. Developer is $4.99 a month, Scaler is $24.92, and Pro jumps to $416.58. That last number is not a typo. Solo devs and side projects: free or self-host. Small teams: Developer or Scaler. Anyone looking at Pro should price the alternatives first.

The catch is that you are picking a lane. SQLite is the original and primary frontend, existing files work as-is, and the compatibility notes are honest that it is not at 100% yet. Postgres is a newer frontend that speaks the Postgres dialect and wire protocol, sharing the same storage and query engine underneath, but the project calls it experimental, so do not plan a migration around it yet. Read-heavy edge apps, mobile backends, and per-user database designs are where this shines.