Skip to content
inetGeek

Amazon RDS pricing and limits

iScore62–73 · ≈#9/14
aws.amazon.com/rds · Managed databases
SEPT 2026 audit

AWS managed relational database service running PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server and Db2 on provisioned DB instances.

Visit Amazon RDS documentation
Compare Amazon RDS with

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

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.
Regions39 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.
Free tierNo — Free usage is time-boxed (6 months on the Free plan, 12 months legacy), not an ongoing free plan.
CategoryManaged databases

Reviewed by Palash BagchiUpdated 27 criteria comparedSources last checked

Amazon RDS pricing at a glance

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) source ↗
Pricing model
On-Demand DB instance hours billed per second with a 10-minute minimum, plus provisioned storage, backup storage and data transfer… source ↗
When the free offer ends
6 months from account creation source ↗

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

01.Evaluation guide

Who it suits

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.

Consider something else if…

You want a database per pull request. RDS documents no branching, and replicas are manual — AWS states outright that it does not autoscale them.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

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

Amazon RDS pricing

5 criteria
Free tierNo — Free usage is time-boxed (6 months on the Free plan, 12 months legacy), not an ongoing free plan.
Sources (1) →
  • 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

Kind of free offerIntroductory free tier
Sources (1) →
  • 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

When the free offer ends6 months from account creation.
Sources (1) →
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.
Sources (1) →
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.
Sources (1) →
  • 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

Limits

2 criteria
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).
Sources (1) →
  • 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

Memory (entry plan)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.
Sources (1) →

Execution

1 criteria
Managed connection poolingSupported
Sources (1) →
  • Amazon RDS Proxy — Amazon Relational Database Service User Guide ↗

    “By using Amazon RDS Proxy, you can allow your applications to pool and share database connections to improve their ability to scale. [...] RDS Proxy establishes a database connection pool and reuses connections in this pool. [...] For RDS DB instances in replication configurations, you can associate a proxy only with the writer DB instance, not a read replica.”

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

Infrastructure

2 criteria
Regions39 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.
Sources (1) →
Uptime SLA99.95% 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.
Sources (1) →
  • Amazon RDS Service Level Agreement ↗

    “make each Multi-AZ DB Instance and each Multi-AZ DB Cluster available with a Monthly Uptime Percentage [...] Less than 99.95% but equal to or greater than 99.0% 10% [...] make each Single-DB Instance available with an Instance-Level Uptime Percentage [...] Less than 99.5% but equal to or greater than 99.0% 10%”

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

Data

7 criteria
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.
Sources (1) →
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.
Sources (1) →
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.
Sources (1) →
  • Stopping an Amazon RDS DB instance temporarily - Amazon RDS User Guide ↗

    “You can stop your DB instance intermittently for temporary testing or for a daily development activity, for a maximum of 7 consecutive days. [...] While the instance is stopped, you're not charged for DB instance hours. [...] If you don't manually start your DB instance after it is stopped for seven consecutive days, RDS automatically starts your DB instance for you.”

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

Point-in-time recoveryAny 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.
Sources (1) →
Read replicasSupported — 15 per primary, raisable on request
Sources (1) →
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.
Sources (1) →
  • 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

Rewind in placeNot supported — Point-in-time restore creates a new DB instance without modifying the source; no in-place rewind.
Sources (1) →

Compliance

10 criteria
SOC 2Listed as SOC-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.
Sources (1) →
  • AWS Services in Scope — SOC ↗

    “This webpage provides a list of AWS Services in Scope of AWS assurance programs. [...] Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) ✓ Amazon Route 53 ✓ Amazon S3 Glacier ✓ Amazon”

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

ISO 27001Covered 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.
Sources (1) →
HIPAAListed as a HIPAA-eligible service on AWS's own reference page. — SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Db2 and MariaDB engines only.
Sources (1) →
  • HIPAA Eligible Services Reference — AWS ↗

    “The services listed below are eligible to create, receive, process, maintain, or transmit electronic protected health information (ePHI). [...] Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) [SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Db2”

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

GDPR / data residencyAWS customers can process personal data on all AWS services in compliance with GDPR, and choose the storage type and geographic region for their data.
Sources (1) →
  • 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

PCI DSSListed as PCI DSS-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.
Sources (1) →
  • AWS Services in Scope — PCI DSS ↗

    “This webpage provides a list of AWS Services in Scope of AWS assurance programs. [...] Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS ) ✓ ✓ Amazon Route 53 ✓ ✓ Amazon S3 Glacier ✓ ✓ Amazon”

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

Encryption at restAES-256 encryption of the underlying storage, logs, automated backups, read replicas and snapshots for DB instances created as encrypted.
Sources (1) →
  • Encrypting Amazon RDS resources - Amazon RDS User Guide ↗

    “Data that is encrypted at rest includes the underlying storage for DB instances, its logs, automated backups, read replicas, and snapshots. [...] Amazon RDS encrypted DB instances use the industry standard AES-256 encryption algorithm to encrypt your data on the server that hosts your Amazon RDS DB instances.”

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

Customer-managed keysAn 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.
Sources (1) →
  • Encrypting Amazon RDS resources - Amazon RDS User Guide ↗

    “When you create an encrypted DB instance, you can choose a customer managed key or the AWS managed key for Amazon RDS to encrypt your DB instance. [...] Using AWS KMS, you can create customer managed keys and define the policies that control the use of these customer managed keys.”

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

Role-based access controlAWS IAM identity-based policies, roles and managed policies control access to RDS resources; IAM database authentication is available for MariaDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Sources (1) →
Private networking / VPCDB instances launch into an Amazon VPC with customer-chosen IP ranges, subnets and access control lists, at no additional cost.
Sources (1) →
Dedicated infrastructureA 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.
Sources (1) →

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

Confirm by email; unsubscribe from any issue. Your address goes to Kit and nowhere else — what we do with it.

Amazon RDS 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.

Amazon RDS pricing questions

How much does Amazon RDS cost?

$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.

Amazon RDS for MySQL price feed, US East (N. Virginia) — the data aws.amazon.com/rds/mysql/pricing/ loads into its rate tables · read

How does Amazon RDS charge?

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.

Amazon RDS for MySQL pricing · read

Does Amazon RDS have a free tier?

No free tier; the free offer is a introductory free tier.

Amazon RDS Free Tier · read

Does the Amazon RDS free offer expire?

6 months from account creation.

Amazon RDS Free Tier · read

What uptime does Amazon RDS guarantee?

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.

Amazon RDS Service Level Agreement · read

Compare Amazon RDS withAll alternatives, ranked →
Amazon RDS vs Amazon Aurora
Amazon RDS vs Aiven
Amazon RDS vs Crunchy Bridge
Amazon RDS vs Neo4j
Amazon RDS vs Neon
Amazon RDS vs Nile
Amazon RDS vs PlanetScale
Amazon RDS vs Prisma Postgres
Amazon RDS vs ScaleGrid
Amazon RDS vs Supabase
Amazon RDS vs TigerData
Amazon RDS vs Turso

Comments

Every page here is sourced and dated.