Amazon RDS pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives
Amazon RDS (aws.amazon.com) is a database platform. Pay per database-instance hour, plus per-GB storage, extra IOPS and data transfer out, with optional reserved-instance commitments.. Free plan: No always-free database; the 12-month AWS Free Tier (750 hours a month) does not count..
What Amazon RDS costs
- 10 GB app: $13.98/mo (Single-AZ db.t4g.micro (1 GiB RAM) at $0.016/h x 730 h = $11.68; gp3 storage at the 20 GiB minimum x $0.115 = $2.30; backups assumed inside the free storage allowance ($0); 20 GB transfer out sits inside the 100 GB monthly free allowance ($0). Total $13.98.)
- Side project: $13.98/mo (No always-free tier, so paid. The cheapest provisioned option is the same db.t4g.micro for 730 h ($11.68) plus 20 GiB gp3 ($2.30) = $13.98; 1 GB transfer is inside the free allowance. The fetched pages show no scale-to-zero RDS option, and Aurora is priced on its own page and not included.)
- 100 GB app: $67.95/mo (db.t4g.medium (smallest size with at least 4 GiB RAM) at $0.065/h x 730 h = $47.45; gp3 100 GiB x $0.115 = $11.50; backups assumed inside allocated storage ($0); transfer 200 GB less the 100 GB free allowance = 100 GB x $0.09 = $9.00. Total $67.95.)
Plan compared: On-demand Single-AZ db.t4g.micro PostgreSQL, 730 hours a month, 20 GiB gp3 storage.. Every price is the monthly cost, at list prices on monthly billing, of running the same app database in a US region: a 10 GB production app (the headline), a 250 MB side project and a 100 GB growing app, each with a fixed number of reads, writes and developers, on the cheapest self-serve plan that fully covers it. Free plans count when they cover the whole job and allow production use; trials and sign-up credits do not.
Amazon RDS price hikes
- RDS adds a per-vCPU-hour fee for PostgreSQL 12 after standard support · Mar 1, 2025
PostgreSQL 12 standard support ends 2025-02-28. In US East (Ohio), instances still on it pay $0.100 per vCPU-hour from 2025-03-01 to 2027-02-28, then $0.200 from 2027-03-01.
Cheaper alternatives to Amazon RDS
At a 10 GB production app, Amazon RDS costs $13.98/mo. 1 database platform costs less:
- Firebase: $6.36/mo (Blaze pay-as-you-go, Cloud Firestore Standard edition, Iowa (us-central1), default on-demand prices, after free quotas)
Amazon RDS alternatives: 4 database platforms compared, at every size.
Every change we logged
- Mar 1, 2025 · Price increase: PostgreSQL 12 standard support ends 2025-02-28. In US East (Ohio), instances still on it pay $0.100 per vCPU-hour from 2025-03-01 to 2027-02-28, then $0.200 from 2027-03-01.
Sources
Pricing page: aws.amazon.com/rds/postgresql/pricing. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. USD list prices from the official AWS RDS for PostgreSQL pricing page, read in its Chinese locale, which showed US East (Ohio) by default; us-east-1 was not rendered, so it is assumed equal, and backup storage is assumed free within allocated storage (not shown on the fetched page). WebSearch was unavailable this run, so the change list holds only the Extended Support change found on the page; PricingSaaS has no entry for this product.