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Amazon RDS vs Prisma Postgres

SEPT 2026 audit

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

Reviewed by Palash BagchiUpdated 31 criteria comparedSources last checked

The short answer

Choose Amazon RDS if…

Teams already inside AWS, where the database sitting in the same VPC as everything else is worth more than any single feature on this page. Six engines, up to 35 days of point-in-time recovery, and read replicas you create and delete yourself.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Choose Prisma Postgres if…

Prisma ORM users who want the database and the client from one vendor, with a pooled connection limit stated per plan rather than left to be discovered.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Consider something else if…

  • Amazon RDS: You want a database per pull request. RDS documents no branching, and replicas are manual — AWS states outright that it does not autoscale them.
  • Prisma Postgres: Four separate meters — requests, memory, vCPU and bandwidth — sit on top of the plan fee, so the monthly number is a floor rather than a bill.

Neither quite fits? Every other option, ranked by iScore: Amazon RDS alternatives · Prisma Postgres alternatives

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

Visit Amazon RDS documentationVisit Prisma Postgres 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 RDSPrisma Postgres
Pricing
Free tier
No — Free usage is time-boxed (6 months on the Free plan, 12 months legacy), not an ongoing free plan.
Yes
Kind of free offerIntroductory free tierAlways free
When the free offer ends6 months from account creation.Never — the free tier has no time limit.
Entry paid plan$0.016 per DB instance-hour on-demand for db.t4g.micro, the smallest DB instance class — RDS for MySQL, Single-AZ, US East (N. Virginia). No plan fee or minimum: instance-hours, storage and backups are billed separately. Cheapest of the 216 on-demand rates in this feed; db.t3.micro is next at $0.017.$10/month for Starter. Pro is $49 and Business $129, each including a larger request allowance.
Pricing modelOn-Demand DB instance hours billed per second with a 10-minute minimum, plus provisioned storage, backup storage and data transfer; Reserved Instances discount 1- or 3-year commitments.A plan fee plus usage: requests, memory GB-hours, active vCPU-hours and outbound bandwidth are each metered — $1 per million requests beyond the allowance, $0.006 per GB-hour, $0.064 per vCPU-hour, $0.025 per GB out.
Limits
Storage (entry plan)Minimum 20 GiB of General Purpose SSD storage per DB instance, selectable up to 64 TiB (RDS for MySQL, gp2 or gp3).500 MB on the free plan across 50 databases. Paid plans raise the database count to 1,000 and beyond.
Execution
Managed connection poolingSupportedSupported
Data
EnginePostgreSQL, alongside MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server and Db2. Each engine is a separate RDS product with its own version list and its own feature support, so a capability documented for one is not a capability of RDS as a whole.PostgreSQL.
Connection limitNot a fixed number: RDS for PostgreSQL sets max_connections by formula from the instance's memory — LEAST({DBInstanceClassMemory/9531392}, 5000) — so a bigger instance class gets more connections and the ceiling is 5,000 however large it is. The parameter can be set by hand anywhere from 6 to 262,143, which is a limit on what you may configure rather than what an instance will serve. Other engines use different divisors: MySQL is memory/12582880 with no cap.100 pooled connections on Starter and 10 direct; 10 pooled on Free, 500 on Pro and 1,000 on Business.
When idleA DB instance can be stopped for at most 7 consecutive days, with no instance-hour charges while stopped but provisioned storage and backups still billed; RDS then starts it automatically.Scales to zero when idle, and Prisma states an idle app costs nothing.
Backup retentionBetween 0 and 35 days, set per DB instance; 0 disables automated backups entirely. The default depends on how the instance was created — one day via the API or CLI, seven days via the console — so there is no single default to quote. Multi-AZ DB clusters cannot be set below 1 day.Daily backups with 7-day retention on Starter and Pro, 30 days on Business. The free plan has none.

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.

Free tier

Amazon RDS
No — Free usage is time-boxed (6 months on the Free plan, 12 months legacy), not an ongoing free plan.
Prisma Postgres
Yes
Sources (2) →
  • Amazon RDS Free Tier ↗

    “With Free plan, you can explore Aurora and RDS for up to 6 months without any commitments or cost. [...] If you activated your free tier account prior to July 15th, 2025, you can continue to use select RDS instances for free up to 12 months after your sign-up date.”

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

  • Pricing — Prisma ↗

    “Free $0 / month Free forever. No credit card required. Prisma Compute 1M requests / month 360 GB-hours memory / month 4 active vCPU-hours / month [...] 500 MB storage 50 databases”

    Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing · Report a correction

Kind of free offer

Amazon RDS
Introductory free tier
Prisma Postgres
Always free
Sources (2) →
  • Amazon RDS Free Tier ↗

    “With Free plan, you can explore Aurora and RDS for up to 6 months without any commitments or cost. [...] If you activated your free tier account prior to July 15th, 2025, you can continue to use select RDS instances for free up to 12 months after your sign-up date.”

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

  • Pricing — Prisma ↗

    “Free $0 / month Free forever. No credit card required. Prisma Compute 1M requests / month 360 GB-hours memory / month 4 active vCPU-hours / month [...] 500 MB storage 50 databases”

    Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing · Report a correction

When the free offer ends

Amazon RDS
6 months from account creation.
Prisma Postgres
Never — the free tier has no time limit.
Sources (2) →

Entry paid plan

Amazon RDS
$0.016 per DB instance-hour on-demand for db.t4g.micro, the smallest DB instance class — RDS for MySQL, Single-AZ, US East (N. Virginia). No plan fee or minimum: instance-hours, storage and backups are billed separately. Cheapest of the 216 on-demand rates in this feed; db.t3.micro is next at $0.017.
Prisma Postgres
$10/month for Starter. Pro is $49 and Business $129, each including a larger request allowance.
Sources (2) →

Pricing model

Amazon RDS
On-Demand DB instance hours billed per second with a 10-minute minimum, plus provisioned storage, backup storage and data transfer; Reserved Instances discount 1- or 3-year commitments.
Prisma Postgres
A plan fee plus usage: requests, memory GB-hours, active vCPU-hours and outbound bandwidth are each metered — $1 per million requests beyond the allowance, $0.006 per GB-hour, $0.064 per vCPU-hour, $0.025 per GB out.
Sources (2) →
  • Amazon RDS for MySQL pricing ↗

    “Option to pay as you go with no upfront fees or minimum commitments with On-Demand or Reserved Instances at a discounted rate. Pay only for what you use. [...] On-Demand database (DB) Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour your DB instance runs. [...] Amazon RDS for MySQL supports per-second billing in which partial DB instance hours consumed are billed in one-second increments with a 10-minute minimum.”

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

  • Pricing — Prisma ↗

    “5M requests / month, then $1 per million $0.006 per GB-hour memory $0.064 per active vCPU-hours $0.025 per GB outbound bandwidth”

    Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing · Report a correction

Storage (entry plan)

Amazon RDS
Minimum 20 GiB of General Purpose SSD storage per DB instance, selectable up to 64 TiB (RDS for MySQL, gp2 or gp3).
Prisma Postgres
500 MB on the free plan across 50 databases. Paid plans raise the database count to 1,000 and beyond.
Sources (2) →
  • Amazon RDS for MySQL pricing ↗

    “Amazon RDS provides you the ability to select from 20 GiB to 64 TiB of associated General Purpose SSD storage capacity for your primary data set. [...] gp3 volumes have a baseline performance of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/s throughput.”

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

  • Pricing — Prisma ↗

    “500 MB storage 50 databases [...] 1,000 databases 7-day daily backups”

    Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing · Report a correction

Engine

Amazon RDS
PostgreSQL, alongside MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server and Db2. Each engine is a separate RDS product with its own version list and its own feature support, so a capability documented for one is not a capability of RDS as a whole.
Prisma Postgres
PostgreSQL.
Sources (2) →

Connection limit

Amazon RDS
Not a fixed number: RDS for PostgreSQL sets max_connections by formula from the instance's memory — LEAST({DBInstanceClassMemory/9531392}, 5000) — so a bigger instance class gets more connections and the ceiling is 5,000 however large it is. The parameter can be set by hand anywhere from 6 to 262,143, which is a limit on what you may configure rather than what an instance will serve. Other engines use different divisors: MySQL is memory/12582880 with no cap.
Prisma Postgres
100 pooled connections on Starter and 10 direct; 10 pooled on Free, 500 on Pro and 1,000 on Business.
Sources (2) →

When idle

Amazon RDS
A DB instance can be stopped for at most 7 consecutive days, with no instance-hour charges while stopped but provisioned storage and backups still billed; RDS then starts it automatically.
Prisma Postgres
Scales to zero when idle, and Prisma states an idle app costs nothing.
Sources (2) →

Backup retention

Amazon RDS
Between 0 and 35 days, set per DB instance; 0 disables automated backups entirely. The default depends on how the instance was created — one day via the API or CLI, seven days via the console — so there is no single default to quote. Multi-AZ DB clusters cannot be set below 1 day.
Prisma Postgres
Daily backups with 7-day retention on Starter and Pro, 30 days on Business. The free plan has none.
Sources (2) →
  • Backup retention period — Amazon Relational Database Service User Guide ↗

    “If you create a DB instance using the Amazon RDS API or the AWS CLI and if you don't set the backup retention period, the default backup retention period is one day. If you create a DB instance using the console, the default backup retention period is seven days. [...] You can set the backup retention period of a DB instance to between 0 and 35 days. Setting the backup retention period to 0 disables automated backups. For a Multi-AZ DB cluster, you can set the backup retention period to between 1 and 35 days.”

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

  • Pricing — Prisma ↗

    “Backups Free — Starter Daily, 7-day retention Pro Daily, 7-day retention Business Daily, 30-day retention”

    Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing · Report a correction

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 includesPrisma Postgres: 1 million requests, 360 GB-hours of memory and 4 active vCPU-hours a month, with 500 MB of storage, free forever and no credit card.
Credit card to startPrisma Postgres: No
Startup credit programPrisma Postgres: Prisma for Startups: database bill covered up to $10,000 for one year, plus 1:1 guidance. Venture-funded track requires pre-seed/seed/Series-A funding raised in the last 12 months and founded in the last 5 years; bootstrapped track requires ≥5k MRR for 6 months and 2 full-time team members.
Memory (entry plan)Amazon RDS: 1 GiB of memory and 2 vCPU on the db.t4g.micro DB instance class, the smallest burstable class listed in the RDS hardware specifications.
RegionsAmazon RDS: 39 geographic regions and 124 Availability Zones across the AWS Cloud — AWS-wide footprint; the RDS User Guide lists RDS Regions individually and publishes no total.
Uptime SLAAmazon RDS: 99.95% for a Multi-AZ DB instance or cluster; 99.5% for a single DB instance, which is what you get without enabling Multi-AZ. Both are service-credit thresholds.
Point-in-time recoveryAmazon RDS: Any point inside the configured backup retention period, so up to 35 days. Transaction logs are uploaded to S3 every five minutes, which is what bounds how close to now the latest restorable time can be.
Read replicasAmazon RDS: Supported — 15 per primary, raisable on request
Rewind in placeAmazon RDS: Not supported — Point-in-time restore creates a new DB instance without modifying the source; no in-place rewind.
Support on entry paid planPrisma Postgres: Community support on Free and Starter; standard support on Pro; premium on Business.
SOC 2Amazon RDS: Listed as SOC-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.Prisma Postgres: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-21 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Prisma Postgres.
ISO 27001Amazon RDS: 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.Prisma Postgres: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-21 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Prisma Postgres.
HIPAAAmazon RDS: Listed as a HIPAA-eligible service on AWS's own reference page. — SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Db2 and MariaDB engines only.Prisma Postgres: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-21 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Prisma Postgres.
GDPR / data residencyAmazon RDS: 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.Prisma Postgres: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-21 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Prisma Postgres.
PCI DSSAmazon RDS: Listed as PCI DSS-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.Prisma Postgres: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-21 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Prisma Postgres.
Encryption at restAmazon RDS: AES-256 encryption of the underlying storage, logs, automated backups, read replicas and snapshots for DB instances created as encrypted.Prisma Postgres: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-21 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Prisma Postgres.
Customer-managed keysAmazon RDS: An encrypted DB instance can use a customer managed AWS KMS key instead of the AWS managed key, with key policies and CloudTrail auditing in AWS KMS.Prisma Postgres: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-21 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Prisma Postgres.
Role-based access controlAmazon RDS: AWS IAM identity-based policies, roles and managed policies control access to RDS resources; IAM database authentication is available for MariaDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Private networking / VPCAmazon RDS: DB instances launch into an Amazon VPC with customer-chosen IP ranges, subnets and access control lists, at no additional cost.Prisma Postgres: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-21 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Prisma Postgres.
Dedicated infrastructureAmazon RDS: A DB instance can run in a VPC whose instance tenancy is set to dedicated, restricted to approved EC2 dedicated instance types; a dedicated host is not guaranteed.
04.

Questions this comparison answers.

Entry paid plan: Amazon RDS or Prisma Postgres?

Amazon RDS: $0.016 per DB instance-hour on-demand for db.t4g.micro, the smallest DB instance class — RDS for MySQL, Single-AZ, US East (N. Virginia). No plan fee or minimum: instance-hours, storage and backups are billed separately. Cheapest of the 216 on-demand rates in this feed; db.t3.micro is next at $0.017.

Prisma Postgres: $10/month for Starter. Pro is $49 and Business $129, each including a larger request allowance.

Free tier: Amazon RDS or Prisma Postgres?

Amazon RDS: No — Free usage is time-boxed (6 months on the Free plan, 12 months legacy), not an ongoing free plan.

Prisma Postgres: Yes

Storage (entry plan): Amazon RDS or Prisma Postgres?

Amazon RDS: Minimum 20 GiB of General Purpose SSD storage per DB instance, selectable up to 64 TiB (RDS for MySQL, gp2 or gp3).

Prisma Postgres: 500 MB on the free plan across 50 databases. Paid plans raise the database count to 1,000 and beyond.

Should I choose Amazon RDS or Prisma Postgres?

Pick Amazon RDS if Teams already inside AWS, where the database sitting in the same VPC as everything else is worth more than any single feature on this page. Six engines, up to 35 days of point-in-time recovery, and read replicas you create and delete yourself.

Pick Prisma Postgres if Prisma ORM users who want the database and the client from one vendor, with a pooled connection limit stated per plan rather than left to be discovered.

Provider pages

Amazon RDSAWS managed relational database service running PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server and Db2 on provisioned DB instances.Prisma PostgresServerless Postgres from the Prisma ORM team, billed on requests and compute with a pooled connection limit per plan.

Related comparisons

Aiven vs Amazon RDSAmazon RDS vs Amazon AuroraAmazon RDS vs NileAmazon RDS vs PlanetScaleAmazon RDS vs ScaleGridAmazon RDS vs TigerDataNeon vs Prisma PostgresPrisma Postgres vs Nile

Comments

Every page here is sourced and dated.