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Amazon OpenSearch Service

iScore52–66 · #4/5
aws.amazon.com/opensearch-service · Search
SEPT 2026 audit

Managed OpenSearch in two deployment models: provisioned instances billed by the hour, or serverless billed by compute unit.

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Entry paid plan$0.24 per OCU-hour for serverless, and that figure is quoted from a worked example on the page rather than from its price table — the table renders the rate as a template placeholder filled in by a pricing API. No monthly minimum is published for either model.
Free tierNo
CategorySearch

Updated 6 criteria comparedSources last checked

01.Evaluation guide

Who it suits

An estate already on AWS. Two deployment models under one service — instances you size and reserve, or serverless compute units — with reserved pricing and savings plans available, and IAM, KMS and VPC integration that needs no extra wiring.

Consider something else if…

You want a price you can read off a page. The serverless rate renders as a template placeholder filled in by an API, and the only figure on the pricing page is inside a worked example; vector search is also billed as its own collection type that cannot share compute with keyword search.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

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

Pricing
3 criteria
Free tierNo
Sources (1) →
Entry paid plan$0.24 per OCU-hour for serverless, and that figure is quoted from a worked example on the page rather than from its price table — the table renders the rate as a template placeholder filled in by a pricing API. No monthly minimum is published for either model.
Sources (1) →
  • Amazon OpenSearch Service Pricing ↗

    “Uses .5 OCU-hours per query for two minutes per hour * 730 hours per month: .5 * 2/60 * 730 * $0.24 per OCU-hours = $3 per month”

    Read 2026-09-15 · official pricing

Pricing modelTwo models, billed differently. Provisioned instances are on-demand, reserved or under a savings plan. Serverless bills compute and storage separately, with compute measured in OpenSearch Compute Units that cover CPU, memory and I/O for indexing or querying.
Sources (1) →
  • Amazon OpenSearch Service Pricing ↗

    “For Serverless, you are charged for compute and storage separately. Compute capacity is measured in OpenSearch Compute Units (OCUs), which correspond to the CPU, memory, and I/O resources required to index data or run queries.”

    Read 2026-09-15 · official pricing

Observability
1 criteria
Self-hostableSupported
Sources (1) →
Vector
1 criteria
Hybrid search (vector + keyword)Supported, and billed as a separate workload: a vector search collection cannot share compute units with a search or time-series collection, even under the same KMS key.
Sources (1) →
  • Amazon OpenSearch Service Pricing ↗

    “A vector search collection cannot share OCUs with search and time series collections, even if the vector search collection uses the same KMS key as the search or time series collections.”

    Read 2026-09-15 · official pricing

Compliance
1 criteria
Dedicated infrastructureProvisioned deployments run on instances you size and reserve; serverless does not expose an instance at all and scales compute units instead.
Sources (1) →
  • Amazon OpenSearch Service Pricing ↗

    “For instances, you can use on-demand or Reserved Instance pricing, or save with Database Savings Plans. For Serverless, you are charged for compute and storage separately.”

    Read 2026-09-15 · official pricing

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

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Every page here is sourced and dated.