# Amazon Redshift

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/data-warehouse/aws-redshift/

A warehouse billed by the hour for provisioned nodes or by the second for serverless capacity, with storage scaling independently.

## Who it suits

Constant, predictable query load already inside AWS. At $0.543 an hour a provisioned cluster costs the same whether it serves one query or a million, so heavy continuous use is where the hourly model pays.

Consider something else if The warehouse sits idle. A provisioned cluster bills around $391 a month doing nothing; serverless shuts down when inactive but starts at $1.50 an hour, so the cheaper rate and the cheaper bill are not the same option.

## iScore

86 / 100 (80% interval 81–90), rank 3 of 4 in data-warehouse — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every data-warehouse peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/data-warehouse/aws-redshift/alternatives/

- Price: 83 (76–89), weight 71%, 1 of 3 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: free_offer_type, minimum_paid_price
- Evidence: 93 (93–93), weight 29%, 4 of 4 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: Yes ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/pricing/), read 2026-09-15)
- What the free plan includes: A two-month free trial for provisioned clusters, capped at 750 hours a month — so one cluster running continuously exhausts it almost exactly. Serverless is offered with a credit instead, drawn down at a rate that depends on the endpoint capacity. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/pricing/), read 2026-09-15)
- Entry paid plan: $0.543 an hour for a provisioned cluster, or $1.50 an hour for serverless — about $391 and $1,080 a month if left running. Serverless shuts down when idle and bills per second with a 60-second minimum, so the higher hourly rate can be the cheaper one. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/pricing/), read 2026-09-15)
- Pricing model: Two deployment options priced on time rather than data. Provisioned bills per node-hour for a cluster you size yourself; Serverless bills Redshift Processing Unit hours per second, with a 60-second minimum and no charge for start-up time, shutting down when inactive. Managed storage is billed independently of compute in both. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/pricing/), read 2026-09-15)

### Storage

- Storage price: Redshift Managed Storage grows independently of compute, so a cluster can be sized for query performance without over-provisioning disk. The page states the separation as the design point rather than quoting one rate for it. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/pricing/), read 2026-09-15)

## Compared with

- [Amazon Redshift vs Google BigQuery](https://inetgeek.com/compare/bigquery-vs-aws-redshift/)
- [Amazon Redshift vs ClickHouse Cloud](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aws-redshift-vs-clickhouse-cloud/)
- [Amazon Redshift vs MotherDuck](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aws-redshift-vs-motherduck/)