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Amazon Aurora vs ScaleGrid

SEPT 2026 audit

A comparison of Amazon Aurora and ScaleGrid built from values read directly from each provider's own documentation, with the source recorded against every figure.

Reviewed by Palash BagchiUpdated 32 criteria comparedSources last checked

The short answer

Choose Amazon Aurora if…

Teams on AWS who want a Postgres or MySQL cluster that can throw off a copy-on-write clone of production in minutes, keep up to fifteen readers behind it, and pause to nothing between bursts in serverless mode.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Choose ScaleGrid if…

Teams that already have a favored database engine and cloud provider but want someone else operating it — the BYOC model bills infrastructure at cost and adds management on top, worth it if the operational burden is the actual problem.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Consider something else if…

  • Amazon Aurora: You want the upstream database rather than a compatible one, or a branch workflow rather than a clone. AWS documents cloning as a way to build a test environment, not as something you do per pull request.
  • ScaleGrid: The workload fits a single-engine specialist with its own scale-to-zero or branching model — ScaleGrid's value is operating an engine you already chose, not offering a distinctive one.

Neither quite fits? Every other option, ranked by iScore: Amazon Aurora alternatives · ScaleGrid alternatives

22 sourced criteria separate them — see where, with sources, below.

Visit Amazon Aurora documentationVisit ScaleGrid documentation

No affiliate links, sponsored placements or paid rankings appear on this site. Ordering follows the sourced data and the stated criteria.

01.

At a glance.

CriterionAmazon AuroraScaleGrid
Pricing
Free tierNo — capped Free plan plus time-limited creditsNo
Kind of free offerIntroductory free tierFree trial
When the free offer ends
6 months after the account is opened, or when the credits run out — whichever comes first.
7 days.
Entry paid planNo plan fee and no minimum commitment — Aurora charges for what you use. AWS's own worked example prices serverless compute at $0.12 per ACU-hour on Aurora Standard in US East (N. Virginia), and the smallest capacity you can set is 0.5 ACUs; storage and I/O are billed separately.Dedicated Hosting starts at $10/month for Redis; $13/month PostgreSQL, $18/month MongoDB, $23/month MySQL, all-inclusive of machine, disk and network costs. From the Dedicated Hosting Plans doc; the live /pricing/ calculator quotes higher figures (see notes).
Pricing modelPay per use with no plan fee: instances plus storage plus I/O, or ACU-hours in serverless mode. AWS's own worked example prices serverless compute at $0.12 per ACU-hour on Aurora Standard and $0.156 on Aurora I/O-Optimized in US East (N. Virginia) — the difference being whether I/O is metered separately or folded into a higher compute and storage rate. Provisioned instances also offer Reserved Instance pricing, and usage may qualify for Database Savings Plans against a committed hourly spend.Two models: Dedicated Hosting, an all-inclusive plan covering machine, disk and network cost; or Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC), management-only pricing where the cloud provider is billed separately.
Limits
Storage (entry plan)No included allowance on the pay-as-you-go Paid plan: storage scales automatically up to 256 TiB and is metered per GB-month — $0.10 per GB-month for Aurora Standard in AWS's US East (N. Virginia) example. The AWS Free Tier Free plan caps a cluster at 1 GiB.18 GB storage on NANO, the entry row of the pricing calculator for PostgreSQL on DigitalOcean (1 core, 1 GB RAM); IOPS listed as N/A. Calculator table; renders client-side, so the excerpt needs the render-fetch path.
Memory (entry plan)No plan tiers: memory comes with the Aurora Capacity Unit, and AWS states 1 ACU has approximately 2 GiB of memory. The smallest capacity you can set is 0.5 ACUs; the AWS Free Tier Free plan caps a cluster at 4 ACUs and the Paid plan at 256.1 GB RAM on NANO, the entry row of the pricing calculator for PostgreSQL on DigitalOcean (1 core, 18 GB storage). Calculator table; renders client-side, so the excerpt needs the render-fetch path.
Execution
Managed connection poolingSupported — through Amazon RDS Proxy, a separate feature of the serviceSupported — PgBouncer for PostgreSQL, enabled at cluster creation or later, with pooling mode and pool size set by you.
Infrastructure
Regions34 AWS regions, the same list for the MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible editions. Counted from the two availability tables in Aurora's own docs, which publish the regions and no total.AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, Akamai and DigitalOcean are named as examples, not as a list; the site footer names Oracle and Zadara instead of Akamai. No region list is published.
Data
EngineMySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible. Aurora is AWS's own engine rather than a hosted build of either, so compatibility is the claim being made — existing code, tools and applications are stated to work, which is not the same as being the upstream database.MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ and SQL Server.
Connection limitDerived from memory, not set per plan. On Aurora serverless the default follows the maximum ACU setting — 90 connections on MySQL and 189 on PostgreSQL at 1 ACU, 135/823 at 4 ACUs, 1,000/1,669 at 8 ACUs — and a minimum capacity of 0 or 0.5 ACUs caps PostgreSQL at 2,000.No platform cap published: max_connections (maximum permitted simultaneous client connections) is listed as a customer-editable MySQL server parameter in the ScaleGrid console.
When idlePauses only in serverless mode with minimum capacity set to zero ACUs: the instance auto-pauses after an idle interval you choose — 300 seconds (five minutes) by default and at minimum, up to 86,400 seconds (one day) — and resumes automatically when a connection request arrives.Manual pause/resume on Bring Your Own Cloud clusters: a paused cluster's nodes are stopped and its cloud VM costs stop, but ScaleGrid management costs continue and the data is unreachable until resumed. Only standard clusters using persistent storage; high-performance local-SSD clusters cannot be paused.
Database branchingLimited — clones, not a branch workflowLimited — Clone copies a backup's config and contents into a new, separately billed cluster, not an in-place branch.
Point-in-time recoveryAny point inside the backup retention period, so up to 35 days. Aurora's backups are continuous and incremental against the cluster volume rather than periodic snapshots plus log replay, which is why AWS states no performance impact while they are taken.PostgreSQL PITR: backups every 10 minutes by default, transaction logs retained 7 days; supported on Azure, DigitalOcean, EC2 and OCI only.
Read replicasSupported — 15 per cluster, a quota AWS will not raiseSupported — Converting a standalone deployment to a replica set: 2 + 1 quorum or 3 nodes, in datacenter regions you pick.
Backup retention1 to 35 days. Unlike an RDS DB instance it cannot be set to 0 — Aurora backs the cluster volume up continuously and there is no way to turn that off.Up to five backups per deployment on ScaleGrid's dedicated hosting plans.
Rewind in place
Limited — Aurora MySQL edition only
Not supported — PITR restores via Peek at Backup or Clone into a brand new cluster; the source deployment is not rewound.
Compliance
SOC 2
Assessed by third-party auditors under multiple AWS compliance programs, SOC among them; the docs name SOC, not SOC 2. Reports download via AWS Artifact. AWS names the SOC program, not a SOC 2 type.
SOC 2 Type II audited against the Security trust service criterion by Insight Assurance; report available on request through the Trust Center form.
HIPAA
Listed as a HIPAA-eligible service on AWS's own reference page.
HIPAA compliance listed under Support for ScaleGrid Enterprise (on-premises / private cloud) deployments. Stated for the Enterprise plan only; the SOC 2 trust page does not mention HIPAA.
GDPR / data residency
AWS customers can process personal data on all AWS services in compliance with GDPR, and choose the storage type and geographic region for their data.
GDPR DPA published with EU Standard Contractual Clauses (Module Two) for EEA transfers; ScaleGrid itself is located in the United States.
PCI DSS
Assessed by third-party auditors under multiple AWS compliance programs, PCI among them; no level or version named. Reports download via AWS Artifact.
PCI compliance listed under Support for ScaleGrid Enterprise (on-premises / private cloud) deployments. Stated for the Enterprise plan only; no PCI DSS attestation or level is published.
Encryption at restOn by default: all new database clusters created on or after February 18, 2026 are encrypted at rest with AES-256 under an AWS KMS key.Optional encryption at rest for data and backups; when enabled, backups are encrypted and can only be mounted on the database machines.
Customer-managed keysThree KMS key types: an AWS owned key by default, an AWS managed key, or a customer managed key stored in your account that you own and fully control. AWS KMS charges apply for a customer managed key.Bring Your Own Encryption Key lets customers control the OS encryption key used for their deployments, announced in the March 2026 platform updates. Listed under Other Relevant Updates in the platform's March 2026 product-update summary.
Role-based access controlIAM identity-based policies and roles govern who may act on Aurora resources, and IAM database authentication can be used to sign in to the DB cluster.Role-Based Access Control in the ScaleGrid console: roles and permissions can be assigned to the users on a team account.
Private networking / VPC
Clusters sit behind security groups with network access off by default; a non-public instance is reachable over Site-to-Site VPN or Direct Connect. DB clusters launch into a VPC at no additional cost.
Bring Your Own Cloud plans can use VPCs (AWS VPC, GCP VPC, OCI VCN, Azure VNET) and Security Groups; Dedicated Hosting plans cannot.
Dedicated infrastructureWith dedicated VPC tenancy an Aurora DB cluster runs on dedicated hardware; all Aurora PostgreSQL instance classes except burstable db.t3/db.t4g support it.Dedicated Hosting plans run on dedicated virtual machines hosted by ScaleGrid, exclusive to a single client or business.

Only criteria both providers publish appear here; a tinted cell marks a real difference. Criteria only one of them documents are listed below, and an absence there means we found no source — not that the feature is missing. How we source this.

The small bar above a value is inetGeek's own lean toward that side — computed from the same facts shown, never a number the provider published. See the picker below "The short answer" to weigh only the criteria you care about.

02.

Where they differ.

Kind of free offer

Amazon Aurora
Introductory free tier
ScaleGrid
Free trial
Sources (2) →
  • AWS Free Tier ↗

    “The account closes on its own 6 months after you open it or when your credits run out, whichever comes first. You won't be charged unless you convert to a Paid plan.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • ScaleGrid Pricing ↗

    “Dive in for free Explore free for a full week-no credit card, no hassle.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official pricing · Report a correction

When the free offer ends

Amazon Aurora

6 months after the account is opened, or when the credits run out — whichever comes first.

ScaleGrid

7 days.

Sources (2) →

Entry paid plan

Amazon Aurora
No plan fee and no minimum commitment — Aurora charges for what you use. AWS's own worked example prices serverless compute at $0.12 per ACU-hour on Aurora Standard in US East (N. Virginia), and the smallest capacity you can set is 0.5 ACUs; storage and I/O are billed separately.
ScaleGrid
Dedicated Hosting starts at $10/month for Redis; $13/month PostgreSQL, $18/month MongoDB, $23/month MySQL, all-inclusive of machine, disk and network costs. From the Dedicated Hosting Plans doc; the live /pricing/ calculator quotes higher figures (see notes).
Sources (2) →

Pricing model

Amazon Aurora
Pay per use with no plan fee: instances plus storage plus I/O, or ACU-hours in serverless mode. AWS's own worked example prices serverless compute at $0.12 per ACU-hour on Aurora Standard and $0.156 on Aurora I/O-Optimized in US East (N. Virginia) — the difference being whether I/O is metered separately or folded into a higher compute and storage rate. Provisioned instances also offer Reserved Instance pricing, and usage may qualify for Database Savings Plans against a committed hourly spend.
ScaleGrid
Two models: Dedicated Hosting, an all-inclusive plan covering machine, disk and network cost; or Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC), management-only pricing where the cloud provider is billed separately.
Sources (2) →
  • Amazon Aurora pricing — Amazon Web Services ↗

    “Aurora charges for database instances and storage, along with any optional features you choose to enable. Aurora PostgreSQL and Aurora MySQL offer On-Demand and Reserved Instance pricing. [...] We want to calculate the compute costs of running this workload on Aurora serverless with the database cluster configured as Aurora Standard and Aurora I/O-Optimized in US East (N. Virginia). [...] 5 ACUs * $0.12 per ACU-hour * 30/60 hour $0.30 [...] 5 ACUs * $0.156 per ACU-hour * 30/60 hour $0.39”

    Read 2026-09-09 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • ScaleGrid Pricing ↗

    “Our Dedicated Hosting plans are all-inclusive and cover machine cost, as well as your disk and network costs and up to 5 free backups. The Bring Your Own Cloud plans are management-only and connect to your existing cloud account so you pay for those costs with your cloud provider.”

    Read 2026-09-14 · official pricing · Report a correction

Storage (entry plan)

Amazon Aurora
No included allowance on the pay-as-you-go Paid plan: storage scales automatically up to 256 TiB and is metered per GB-month — $0.10 per GB-month for Aurora Standard in AWS's US East (N. Virginia) example. The AWS Free Tier Free plan caps a cluster at 1 GiB.
ScaleGrid
18 GB storage on NANO, the entry row of the pricing calculator for PostgreSQL on DigitalOcean (1 core, 1 GB RAM); IOPS listed as N/A. Calculator table; renders client-side, so the excerpt needs the render-fetch path.
Sources (2) →
  • Amazon Aurora Pricing — Amazon Web Services ↗

    “Free plan gives you access to Aurora PostgreSQL serverless instances with up to 4 ACUs and 1 GiB of storage per cluster. You can upgrade to the Paid plan at any time to increase capacity up to 256 ACUs and automatically scale storage up to 256 TiB. [...] We want to calculate the storage and I/O cost of running this workload with Aurora Standard and Aurora I/O-Optimized storage in US East (N. Virginia). [...] 80 GB * $0.10 per GB-month (30 days)”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • Database Hosting Pricing - Choose Your Plan | ScaleGrid ↗

    “CORE (S) RAM (GB) STORAGE (GB) MONTHLY PRICE (USD) [...] NANO 1 1 18 IOPS: N/A”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official pricing · Report a correction

Memory (entry plan)

Amazon Aurora
No plan tiers: memory comes with the Aurora Capacity Unit, and AWS states 1 ACU has approximately 2 GiB of memory. The smallest capacity you can set is 0.5 ACUs; the AWS Free Tier Free plan caps a cluster at 4 ACUs and the Paid plan at 256.
ScaleGrid
1 GB RAM on NANO, the entry row of the pricing calculator for PostgreSQL on DigitalOcean (1 core, 18 GB storage). Calculator table; renders client-side, so the excerpt needs the render-fetch path.
Sources (2) →

Regions

Amazon Aurora
34 AWS regions, the same list for the MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible editions. Counted from the two availability tables in Aurora's own docs, which publish the regions and no total.
ScaleGrid
AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, Akamai and DigitalOcean are named as examples, not as a list; the site footer names Oracle and Zadara instead of Akamai. No region list is published.
Sources (2) →
  • Regions and Availability Zones — Amazon Aurora User Guide ↗

    “Aurora MySQL Region availability The following table shows the AWS Regions where Aurora MySQL is currently available and the endpoint for each Region. Region Name Region Endpoint Protocol US East (Ohio) us-east-2 rds.us-east-2.amazonaws.com HTTPS US East (N. Virginia) us-east-1 rds.us-east-1.amazonaws.com HTTPS [...] Aurora PostgreSQL Region availability”

    Read 2026-09-09 · official docs · Report a correction

  • ScaleGrid MySQL Hosting ↗

    “offering high availability, dedicated servers, and superuser control across major cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, Akamai and DigitalOcean”

    Read 2026-09-14 · official site · Report a correction

Engine

Amazon Aurora
MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible. Aurora is AWS's own engine rather than a hosted build of either, so compatibility is the claim being made — existing code, tools and applications are stated to work, which is not the same as being the upstream database.
ScaleGrid
MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ and SQL Server.
Sources (2) →
  • What is Amazon Aurora? — Amazon Aurora User Guide ↗

    “Amazon Aurora (Aurora) is a fully managed relational database engine that's compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. [...] The code, tools, and applications you use today with your existing MySQL and PostgreSQL databases can be used with Aurora.”

    Read 2026-09-09 · official docs · Report a correction

  • ScaleGrid Pricing ↗

    “ScaleGrid for MySQL™ ScaleGrid for PostgreSQL® ScaleGrid for MongoDB® ScaleGrid for Redis® ScaleGrid for RabbitMQ ScaleGrid for SQL Server®”

    Read 2026-09-14 · official pricing · Report a correction

Connection limit

Amazon Aurora
Derived from memory, not set per plan. On Aurora serverless the default follows the maximum ACU setting — 90 connections on MySQL and 189 on PostgreSQL at 1 ACU, 135/823 at 4 ACUs, 1,000/1,669 at 8 ACUs — and a minimum capacity of 0 or 0.5 ACUs caps PostgreSQL at 2,000.
ScaleGrid
No platform cap published: max_connections (maximum permitted simultaneous client connections) is listed as a customer-editable MySQL server parameter in the ScaleGrid console.
Sources (2) →

When idle

Amazon Aurora
Pauses only in serverless mode with minimum capacity set to zero ACUs: the instance auto-pauses after an idle interval you choose — 300 seconds (five minutes) by default and at minimum, up to 86,400 seconds (one day) — and resumes automatically when a connection request arrives.
ScaleGrid
Manual pause/resume on Bring Your Own Cloud clusters: a paused cluster's nodes are stopped and its cloud VM costs stop, but ScaleGrid management costs continue and the data is unreachable until resumed. Only standard clusters using persistent storage; high-performance local-SSD clusters cannot be paused.
Sources (2) →
  • Scaling to Zero ACUs with automatic pause and resume for Aurora serverless — Amazon Aurora User Guide ↗

    “Aurora serverless DB instances can automatically pause after a period with no user connections, and automatically resume when a connection request arrives. [...] To enable the auto-pause behavior for all the Aurora serverless DB instances in an Aurora cluster, you set the minimum capacity value for the cluster to zero ACUs. [...] The minimum interval that you can set is 300 seconds (five minutes). That's the default if you don't specify an interval. The maximum interval that you can set is 86,400 seconds (one day).”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official docs · Report a correction

  • New Feature for BYOC - Pausing and Resuming Clusters ↗

    “you will be able to pause a running cluster, putting it in a “Paused” state. The “Paused” state means that all cluster nodes are in a stopped state. While a cluster is “Paused” you will no longer get charged for your cloud provider’s VM costs [...] you will still get charged for the ScaleGrid management cost [...] This feature is only available on standard clusters using persistent storage”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official site · Report a correction

Point-in-time recovery

Amazon Aurora
Any point inside the backup retention period, so up to 35 days. Aurora's backups are continuous and incremental against the cluster volume rather than periodic snapshots plus log replay, which is why AWS states no performance impact while they are taken.
ScaleGrid
PostgreSQL PITR: backups every 10 minutes by default, transaction logs retained 7 days; supported on Azure, DigitalOcean, EC2 and OCI only.
Sources (2) →

Backup retention

Amazon Aurora
1 to 35 days. Unlike an RDS DB instance it cannot be set to 0 — Aurora backs the cluster volume up continuously and there is no way to turn that off.
ScaleGrid
Up to five backups per deployment on ScaleGrid's dedicated hosting plans.
Sources (2) →

Rewind in place

Amazon Aurora
Limited — Aurora MySQL edition only
ScaleGrid
Not supported — PITR restores via Peek at Backup or Clone into a brand new cluster; the source deployment is not rewound.
Sources (2) →

SOC 2

Amazon Aurora
Assessed by third-party auditors under multiple AWS compliance programs, SOC among them; the docs name SOC, not SOC 2. Reports download via AWS Artifact. AWS names the SOC program, not a SOC 2 type.
ScaleGrid
SOC 2 Type II audited against the Security trust service criterion by Insight Assurance; report available on request through the Trust Center form.
Sources (2) →
  • Compliance validation for Amazon Aurora — Amazon Aurora User Guide ↗

    “Third-party auditors assess the security and compliance of Amazon Aurora as part of multiple AWS compliance programs. These include SOC, PCI, FedRAMP, HIPAA, and others. [...] You can download third-party audit reports using AWS Artifact.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official docs · Report a correction

  • ScaleGrid SOC 2 Type II Audited Controls ↗

    “ScaleGrid’s SOC 2 Type II audit focused on the Security trust service criterion and evaluated the effectiveness of our Security controls and operational practices over time. The audit was conducted by independent audit firm Insight Assurance. [...] Customers and prospective customers may request access to ScaleGrid’s SOC 2 Type II report and supporting security documentation through the request form on this page.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official site · Report a correction

HIPAA

Amazon Aurora
Listed as a HIPAA-eligible service on AWS's own reference page.
ScaleGrid
HIPAA compliance listed under Support for ScaleGrid Enterprise (on-premises / private cloud) deployments. Stated for the Enterprise plan only; the SOC 2 trust page does not mention HIPAA.
Sources (2) →

GDPR / data residency

Amazon Aurora
AWS customers can process personal data on all AWS services in compliance with GDPR, and choose the storage type and geographic region for their data.
ScaleGrid
GDPR DPA published with EU Standard Contractual Clauses (Module Two) for EEA transfers; ScaleGrid itself is located in the United States.
Sources (2) →
  • GDPR — Amazon Web Services ↗

    “AWS customers can use all AWS services to process personal data [...] in compliance with the GDPR. [...] Customers have control of their customer data. With AWS, customers can: Determine where their customer data will be stored, including the type of storage and geographic region of that storage.”

    Read 2026-09-12 · official site · Report a correction

  • Data Processing Addendum (DPA) | ScaleGrid ↗

    “ScaleGrid is located in the United States and to the extent any processing of Personal Data of Data Subjects located in the EEA by ScaleGrid takes place in any country outside the EEA (other than exclusively in an Adequate Country), there must be a lawful basis for this transfer as required by the Data Protection Legislation.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official site · Report a correction

PCI DSS

Amazon Aurora
Assessed by third-party auditors under multiple AWS compliance programs, PCI among them; no level or version named. Reports download via AWS Artifact.
ScaleGrid
PCI compliance listed under Support for ScaleGrid Enterprise (on-premises / private cloud) deployments. Stated for the Enterprise plan only; no PCI DSS attestation or level is published.
Sources (2) →

Encryption at rest

Amazon Aurora
On by default: all new database clusters created on or after February 18, 2026 are encrypted at rest with AES-256 under an AWS KMS key.
ScaleGrid
Optional encryption at rest for data and backups; when enabled, backups are encrypted and can only be mounted on the database machines.
Sources (2) →

Customer-managed keys

Amazon Aurora
Three KMS key types: an AWS owned key by default, an AWS managed key, or a customer managed key stored in your account that you own and fully control. AWS KMS charges apply for a customer managed key.
ScaleGrid
Bring Your Own Encryption Key lets customers control the OS encryption key used for their deployments, announced in the March 2026 platform updates. Listed under Other Relevant Updates in the platform's March 2026 product-update summary.
Sources (2) →

Role-based access control

Amazon Aurora
IAM identity-based policies and roles govern who may act on Aurora resources, and IAM database authentication can be used to sign in to the DB cluster.
ScaleGrid
Role-Based Access Control in the ScaleGrid console: roles and permissions can be assigned to the users on a team account.
Sources (2) →

Private networking / VPC

Amazon Aurora
Clusters sit behind security groups with network access off by default; a non-public instance is reachable over Site-to-Site VPN or Direct Connect. DB clusters launch into a VPC at no additional cost.
ScaleGrid
Bring Your Own Cloud plans can use VPCs (AWS VPC, GCP VPC, OCI VCN, Azure VNET) and Security Groups; Dedicated Hosting plans cannot.
Sources (2) →

Dedicated infrastructure

Amazon Aurora
With dedicated VPC tenancy an Aurora DB cluster runs on dedicated hardware; all Aurora PostgreSQL instance classes except burstable db.t3/db.t4g support it.
ScaleGrid
Dedicated Hosting plans run on dedicated virtual machines hosted by ScaleGrid, exclusive to a single client or business.
Sources (2) →

When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.

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03.

Documented by only one.

These criteria are published by one provider and not the other. An absence here means we have not found a source, not that the feature is missing — except where we say we read the other provider's own page on a given date and it does not state it. Those rows lean, and the provider can correct them with a link.

What the free plan includesScaleGrid: A full week of access with no credit card. There is no ongoing free plan.
Credit card to startScaleGrid: No
Startup credit programScaleGrid: Startup Saver: up to 50% discount on ScaleGrid hosting for 12 months. — A discount on the invoice, not a credit balance.
Scales to zeroAmazon Aurora: Supported — serverless capacity mode only
Uptime SLAAmazon Aurora: 99.99% for a cluster deployed across two or more Availability Zones; 99.9% for a single-AZ cluster. Both are service-credit thresholds.
ISO 27001Amazon Aurora: Covered under AWS's account-wide ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification — not scoped per-service the way SOC, HIPAA and PCI DSS are on AWS's own site.
04.

Questions this comparison answers.

Entry paid plan: Amazon Aurora or ScaleGrid?

Amazon Aurora: No plan fee and no minimum commitment — Aurora charges for what you use. AWS's own worked example prices serverless compute at $0.12 per ACU-hour on Aurora Standard in US East (N. Virginia), and the smallest capacity you can set is 0.5 ACUs; storage and I/O are billed separately.

ScaleGrid: Dedicated Hosting starts at $10/month for Redis; $13/month PostgreSQL, $18/month MongoDB, $23/month MySQL, all-inclusive of machine, disk and network costs. From the Dedicated Hosting Plans doc; the live /pricing/ calculator quotes higher figures (see notes).

Storage (entry plan): Amazon Aurora or ScaleGrid?

Amazon Aurora: No included allowance on the pay-as-you-go Paid plan: storage scales automatically up to 256 TiB and is metered per GB-month — $0.10 per GB-month for Aurora Standard in AWS's US East (N. Virginia) example. The AWS Free Tier Free plan caps a cluster at 1 GiB.

ScaleGrid: 18 GB storage on NANO, the entry row of the pricing calculator for PostgreSQL on DigitalOcean (1 core, 1 GB RAM); IOPS listed as N/A. Calculator table; renders client-side, so the excerpt needs the render-fetch path.

Should I choose Amazon Aurora or ScaleGrid?

Pick Amazon Aurora if Teams on AWS who want a Postgres or MySQL cluster that can throw off a copy-on-write clone of production in minutes, keep up to fifteen readers behind it, and pause to nothing between bursts in serverless mode.

Pick ScaleGrid if Teams that already have a favored database engine and cloud provider but want someone else operating it — the BYOC model bills infrastructure at cost and adds management on top, worth it if the operational burden is the actual problem.

Provider pages

Amazon AuroraAWS relational database engine compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL, built on a shared cluster volume with copy-on-write cloning and a serverless capacity mode.ScaleGridManaged hosting for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis and more, across six cloud providers via dedicated or bring-your-own-cloud plans.

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Comments

Every page here is sourced and dated.