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Aiven pricing and limits

iScore63–75 · ≈#3/14
aiven.io · Managed databases
SEPT 2026 audit

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

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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.
Regions153 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.
Free tierYes — indefinite, but idle services are powered off
CategoryManaged databases

Reviewed by Palash BagchiUpdated 21 criteria comparedSources last checked

Aiven pricing at a glance

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 source ↗
Pricing model
Fixed plans quoted both monthly and hourly, with the plan setting CPU, RAM and storage together rather than metering them separately source ↗
When the free offer ends
Never — free services have no time limitations source ↗

First line of each sourced value. The full text is in Aiven pricing below. How this free offer stacks up: cloud free tiers compared.

01.Evaluation guide

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.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Machine-derived signals

Not sourced facts — counts and matches read by a script, not a person. See each line for where it comes from.

Aiven's own site (aiven.io) self-detects as: hosting — US hosting, Cloud Hosting, Cloud PaaS, Server Location, Indian hosting · CDN — Edge Delivery Network · DNS — Enterprise DNS, TLD Redirects (category-level via BuiltWith, not a named vendor)

Each value below links to the page it was read from, with the sentence it came from. Criteria Aiven does not publish are not listed.

Aiven pricing

7 criteria
Free tierYes — indefinite, but idle services are powered off
Sources (1) →
  • Free plans — Aiven docs ↗

    “You don't need a credit card to create a free service and you can use them indefinitely free of charge. Free services do not have any time limitations. However, Aiven reserves the right to: Power off free services with no initial usage within the first few hours after the service is running. [...] Power off free services with no continuative activity on the service.”

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

Kind of free offerAlways free
Sources (1) →
  • Free plans — Aiven docs ↗

    “You don't need a credit card to create a free service and you can use them indefinitely free of charge. Free services do not have any time limitations. However, Aiven reserves the right to: Power off free services with no initial usage within the first few hours after the service is running. [...] Power off free services with no continuative activity on the service.”

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

Credit card to startNo
Sources (1) →
When the free offer endsNever — free services have no time limitations.
Sources (1) →
  • Aiven free plan ↗

    “You don't need a credit card to create a free service and you can use them indefinitely free of charge. Free services do not have any time limitations.”

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

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.
Sources (1) →
  • Plans & Pricing — Aiven ↗

    “Free $0 / month [...] 1 GB total storage Cannot select a specific cloud or region No integrations or connection pooling Developer $5 / month [...] 8 GB total storage Cannot select a specific cloud or region No integrations or connection pooling Hobbyist starting from $12 / month $0.02 / hour [...] Startup starting from $75 / month $0.10 / hour [...] 99.99% uptime SLA Business starting from $180 / month $0.25 / hour”

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

Pricing modelFixed 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.
Sources (1) →
  • Plans & Pricing — Aiven ↗

    “Aiven's pricing is all-inclusive and transparent, providing you with the confidence [...] Startup starting from $75 / month $0.10 / hour [...] Business starting from $180 / month $0.25 / hour [...] Everything in Startup, plus high availability Premium starting from $270 / month $0.37 / hour”

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

Startup credit programAiven for Startups: $12,000–$100,000 in Aiven credits over 12 months. Requires founded ≤7 years ago and external funding from pre-seed to Series B.
Sources (1) →
  • Aiven for Startups ↗

    “Your startup should have been founded no more than 7 years ago. Your company should have raised external funding anything from pre-seed to Series B. From $12,000 up to $100,000 in Aiven credits to power your data infrastructure over the course of 12 months.”

    Read 2026-09-11 · official site · Report a correction

Execution

1 criteria
Managed connection poolingSupported — not on the Free or Developer tiers
Sources (1) →
  • Aiven for PostgreSQL® connection pooling with PgBouncer — Aiven docs ↗

    “Without a connection pooler, the database connections are handled directly by PostgreSQL backend processes, with one process per connection: Adding a PgBouncer pooler that utilizes fewer backend connections frees up server resources for more important uses, such as disk caching: Instead of having dedicated connections per client, now PgBouncer manages the connections assignment optimising them based on client request and settings like the pooling modes.”

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

Infrastructure

2 criteria
Regions153 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.
Sources (1) →
  • Available cloud regions — Aiven docs ↗

    “This is a reference list of the default cloud regions available per provider on the Aiven Platform. note The list of available clouds can differ per project. Not all Aiven service types are available for all cloud providers and regions.”

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

Uptime SLA99.99% from Startup ($75/month), the entry paid plan, upward.
Sources (1) →
  • Aiven Pricing ↗

    “startup starting from $75 / month $0.10 / hour get building view 7 plans 1 dedicated VM 2-32 CPU per VM 4-192 GB RAM per VM 80 GB-11 TB total storage 99.99% uptime SLA”

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

Data

6 criteria
EnginePostgreSQL, 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.
Sources (1) →
  • Aiven for PostgreSQL® — Aiven docs ↗

    “Aiven for PostgreSQL is the perfect fit for your relational data. A scalable SQL database solution that can be up and running within a few minutes. [...] Find a comprehensive per-release documentation on the PostgreSQL project website.”

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

Connection limitSet 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.
Sources (1) →
  • Connection limits per plan for Aiven for PostgreSQL® — Aiven docs ↗

    “Default values of the max_connections setting vary according to the service plan: Plan Max connections Developer 15 Free 20 Hobbyist 25 Startup/Business/Premium-4 100 Startup/Business/Premium-8 200 Startup/Business/Premium-16 400 Startup/Business/Premium-32 800 Startup/Business/Premium-64 and above 1000 note Aiven can utilize any number of the connections for managing the service. Aiven for PostgreSQL doesn't apply a fixed per-GiB connection formula”

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

Database branchingLimited — a full copy from the latest backup, not copy-on-write
Sources (1) →
  • Fork a service — Aiven for PostgreSQL® — Aiven docs ↗

    “Fork your Aiven for PostgreSQL® service to create an independent copy for testing, debugging, or development without affecting the original service. Fork an Aiven service to create a complete copy of it from its latest backup. Forked services are independent and don't share resources with or increase the load on the original service. Common use cases for forking include: Creating a snapshot to analyze an issue. Creating a development copy of your production environment.”

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

Point-in-time recoveryBounded 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.
Sources (1) →
  • Aiven for PostgreSQL® backups — Aiven docs ↗

    “Aiven for PostgreSQL® databases are automatically backed up, with full backups made daily, and write-ahead logs (WAL) copied at 5 minute intervals, or for every new file generated. All backups are encrypted using pghoard, an open source tool developed and maintained by Aiven.”

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

Read replicasSupported
Sources (1) →
Backup retentionBy 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.
Sources (1) →
  • Aiven for PostgreSQL® backups — Aiven docs ↗

    “Backup retention time by plan The number of stored backups and the backup retention time depends on the service plan that you have selected. Plan Type Backup Retention Time Hobbyist None Startup 2 days Business 14 days Premium 30 days”

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

Support

1 criteria
Support on entry paid planDocumentation on the free tier; email with best-effort same or next business day responses on paid plans. Faster responses and phone support are three further tiers, charged separately.
Sources (1) →
  • Aiven Pricing ↗

    “Support Offers three additional support tiers with separate charge that include faster response times and phone support Support via documentation Support through email with best-effort responses during the same or next business day”

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

Compliance

4 criteria
SOC 2We also provide ISAE 3000/SOC2 Type II reports.
Sources (1) →
HIPAAOur services are ISO 27000-series, GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA and PCI-DSS compliant.
Sources (1) →
Encryption at restAll data is fully encrypted end-to-end at rest and in transit.
Sources (1) →
Private networking / VPCDeploy services directly into your own cloud account for data residency and VPC peering.
Sources (1) →

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

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Aiven in the news

Headlines from other publications, not checked by us · collected

Selected by a search on this company, refreshed weekly. Nobody here has verified these claims — where something material is confirmed, it is written into the page above with its source, the way every other fact on this site is.

Aiven pricing questions

How much does Aiven cost?

$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.

Plans & Pricing — Aiven · read

How does Aiven charge?

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.

Plans & Pricing — Aiven · read

Does Aiven have a free tier?

Yes.

Free plans — Aiven docs · read

Does the Aiven free offer expire?

Never — free services have no time limitations.

Aiven free plan · read

Do you need a credit card to start on Aiven?

No.

Aiven free plan · read

What uptime does Aiven guarantee?

99.99% from Startup ($75/month), the entry paid plan, upward.

Aiven Pricing · read

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Comments

Every page here is sourced and dated.