# Aiven

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/databases/aiven/

Managed open-source data services across AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, including PostgreSQL on plans that differ by node count and backup history.

## Who it suits

Teams who want more than one open-source data service from one vendor and one bill — Postgres beside Kafka, ClickHouse or OpenSearch — with the availability tier chosen per service rather than fixed.

Consider something else if You want long recovery history on a cheap plan. Backup history is what the plan tiers buy here: two days on the entry paid plan against thirty at the top.

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: Yes — indefinite, but idle services are powered off ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/platform/concepts/free-plan), read 2026-09-09)
- Entry paid plan: $5 a month for Developer — one VM, 1 CPU, 1 GB RAM, 8 GB storage, with no choice of cloud or region and no connection pooling. The first plan that behaves like a production service is Startup at $75 a month or $0.10 an hour, which is where the uptime SLA and multi-CPU sizing begin; Hobbyist sits between them at $12. ([source](https://aiven.io/pricing), read 2026-09-09)
- Pricing model: Fixed plans quoted both monthly and hourly, with the plan setting CPU, RAM and storage together rather than metering them separately. Aiven describes the pricing as all-inclusive: backups, monitoring and support come with the plan instead of appearing as line items. Higher tiers buy node count and backup history — Business adds a standby node, Premium a second. ([source](https://aiven.io/pricing), read 2026-09-09)

### Execution

- Managed connection pooling: Supported — not on the Free or Developer tiers ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/concepts/pg-connection-pooling), read 2026-09-09)

### Infrastructure

- Regions: 153 regions across six clouds — AWS 25, Google 42, Azure 39, OVH 22, UpCloud 16, DigitalOcean 9 — counted from Aiven's own reference list, which publishes the regions and no total. No magnitude is recorded, because Aiven states on that same page that the list differs per project and that not all service types are available in every cloud and region: the number is the platform's reach, not PostgreSQL's, and a bar drawn from it would be compared against providers whose counts are engine-specific. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/platform/reference/list_of_clouds), read 2026-09-09)

### Data

- Engine: PostgreSQL, alongside MySQL, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, Valkey, Kafka, Flink and Grafana. Aiven runs the upstream projects rather than a compatible reimplementation, which is why its own docs point at postgresql.org for per-release detail. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql), read 2026-09-09)
- Connection limit: Set per plan, not by a formula: 100 on the entry paid plan (Startup-4), rising to 200, 400, 800 and 1000 as the plan grows, with 25 on Hobbyist, 20 on Free and 15 on Developer. Aiven states plainly that it does not apply a per-GiB formula, and that some of the allowance is used by Aiven itself to manage the service. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/reference/pg-connection-limits), read 2026-09-09)
- Database branching: Limited — a full copy from the latest backup, not copy-on-write ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/howto/fork-service), read 2026-09-09)
- Point-in-time recovery: Bounded by the plan's backup history, so 2 days on the entry paid plan and 30 at the top. Granularity is fine within that: full backups daily with write-ahead logs copied every 5 minutes or per new file, whichever comes first. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/concepts/pg-backups), read 2026-09-09)
- Read replicas: Supported ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/howto/create-read-replica), read 2026-09-09)
- Backup retention: By plan: none on Hobbyist, 2 days on Startup, 14 on Business, 30 on Premium. The magnitude is Startup's 2 days, the entry paid plan. Aiven's high-availability page states 2 days for Hobbyist where the backups page states none — the backups page is the more specific of the two and is what is recorded here. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/concepts/pg-backups), read 2026-09-09)

## Compared with

- [Aiven vs Neon](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aiven-vs-neon/)
- [Aiven vs Crunchy Bridge](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aiven-vs-crunchy-bridge/)