Amazon Aurora pricing calculator
Instances, Serverless & DSQL. Estimate your costs using AWS list prices.
Estimates from AWS list prices, not an AWS quote. Discounts, taxes and credit terms may affect your bill.
01 · How Amazon Aurora pricing works
What you pay for
- Provisioned instance hours or Serverless v2 ACU-hours ($0.12 per ACU-hour Standard, $0.16 I/O-Optimized, us-east-1).
- Cluster storage per GB-month ($0.10 Standard, $0.225 I/O-Optimized) and, on Aurora Standard only, I/O at $0.20 per million requests.
- Backup storage beyond the cluster size, Backtrack (MySQL), snapshot export, Global Database replicated writes, data transfer.
- Aurora DSQL: Distributed Processing Units and storage.
Common cost traps
- On Aurora Standard, I/O charges can exceed instance cost for write-heavy or scan-heavy workloads; I/O-Optimized removes them for higher instance and storage rates.
- Serverless v2 has a minimum capacity; unless it can scale to 0 ACUs with auto-pause, a quiet cluster still bills that minimum every hour.
- Reader instances bill full price even if they take little traffic.
- Aurora storage auto-grows and, on older versions, may not shrink after deletes.
Ways to reduce cost
- Move to I/O-Optimized when I/O exceeds about a quarter of the Aurora bill (AWS's own guidance).
- Use Graviton r7g/r8g classes and No Upfront RIs for steady writers.
- Use Serverless v2 for spiky or dev clusters, with auto-pause where supported.
- Check cluster storage after large deletes and consider reorganising.
Free Tier & account eligibility
Free Tier depends on account age. Accounts created on or after 15 July 2025 get a $100 sign-up credit plus up to $100 more for completing onboarding activities; on the Free plan these last 6 months (or until used up), on the Paid plan unused Free Tier credits stay usable for 12 months from sign-up. Accounts created before 15 July 2025 keep the legacy Free Tier (12-month offers plus always-free offers). Always-free offers apply on both plans. Aurora has no 12-month legacy allowance in the directory used here. Aurora DSQL is always free up to 100,000 DPUs and 1 GB of storage per month. New-plan accounts can pay Aurora from Free Tier credits.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon Aurora?
Aurora instance hours, Serverless v2 ACU-hours, storage, I/O, backup beyond the free allowance, Backtrack, Global Database replication and Aurora DSQL usage are eligible usage and are offset by credits. General rules: credits only offset charges from the billing cycle in which they were applied onward (never past bills), they apply only to the services listed on the credit in Billing and Cost Management > Credits, they expire on the date shown there, and accounts on the AWS Free plan cannot receive Activate credits until they upgrade to the Paid plan.
Check my creditsExcluded charges & conditions
- Upfront payments on Aurora Reserved Instances.
- Upfront payments for Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (All Upfront, and the upfront part of Partial Upfront). The recurring hourly fee of a No Upfront commitment is billed as normal usage and can be offset.
- AWS Marketplace charges (Activate credits make an exception for third-party foundation models used through Amazon Bedrock).
- AWS Enterprise Support, Enterprise On-Ramp, Unified Operations, resold support and partner-led support.
- Amazon Route 53 domain name registration and transfer fees.
- Taxes (sales, use, VAT and similar), AWS Professional Services, Training and Certification, Mechanical Turk, AWS Managed Services, and any use for cryptocurrency mining.
Illustrative credit runway
Single-service examples from the supplied data, not your calculator result. Months = credit amount ÷ monthly cost, before credit expiry. Credits can expire before these theoretical months are used; coverage and other AWS services can shorten runway.
| Usage profile | Monthly estimate | $10,000 | $25,000 | $100,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small | $93.60 | 106.8 mo. | 267.1 mo. | 1,068.4 mo. |
| Medium | $532.96 | 18.8 mo. | 46.9 mo. | 187.6 mo. |
| Large | $2,287.31 | 4.4 mo. | 10.9 mo. | 43.7 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless v2 averaging 1 ACU, 20 GB storage, 20 M I/O | Serverless v2 ACUs: 730 ACU-hours x $0.12 = $87.60; Storage (Standard): 20 GB-month x $0.1 = $2.00; I/O requests: 20 million x $0.2 = $4.00 | Total ~$93.60/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
2 x db.r7g.large (writer + reader), Aurora Standard, 300 GB, 500 M I/O | db.r7g.large: 1,460 hours x $0.276 = $402.96; Storage (Standard): 300 GB-month x $0.1 = $30.00; I/O requests: 500 million x $0.2 = $100.00 | Total ~$532.96/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
3 x db.r7g.xlarge on I/O-Optimized, 3 TB storage, 1 TB extra backup | db.r7g.xlarge I/O-Optimized: 2,190 hours x $0.719 = $1,574.61; Storage (I/O-Optimized): 3,072 GB-month x $0.225 = $691.20; Backup beyond free: 1,024 GB-month x $0.021 = $21.50 | Total ~$2,287.31/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon Aurora pricing FAQ
Standard or I/O-Optimized?
Standard is cheaper when I/O is light. I/O-Optimized has no per-request I/O charge but higher instance and storage rates; it usually wins once I/O is more than about 25% of total Aurora spend.
Can Serverless v2 cost nothing when idle?
Only if the cluster is configured with a 0 ACU minimum and auto-pause, on supported versions. Otherwise the minimum ACUs bill every hour.
Do credits cover Aurora DSQL?
Yes, DSQL is Aurora usage; the always-free DSQL allowance applies first.
Is Aurora backup storage free?
Backup storage up to the cluster volume size, within the retention period, is included. Extra backup and manual snapshots cost $0.021/GB-month here.
05 · Sources & estimate notes
Content pack dated 2026-10-19. Calculator rates remain their existing snapshots; this content update is not a price refresh.
Verification notes
- Aurora Serverless v2 scale-to-zero/auto-pause availability depends on engine version; confirm before relying on it.
- Only data-transfer tiers of aurora were refreshed from the AWS Price List; service rates are the repository snapshot. Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/.