Amazon DocumentDB pricing calculator
On-Demand & Serverless. 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 DocumentDB pricing works
What you pay for
- Instance hours (per second, 10-minute minimum) or Serverless DCU-hours.
- Storage per GB-month and, on Standard storage, I/O at $0.20 per million; I/O-Optimized removes I/O charges for higher instance and storage rates.
- Backup storage beyond 100% of cluster storage, Elastic Clusters shard capacity, data transfer, T-instance CPU credits.
Common cost traps
- I/O charges on Standard storage can exceed instance costs for scan-heavy workloads.
- Each replica is a full instance price.
- T-class instances bill CPU credits ($0.09 per vCPU-hour here) when they burst above baseline for long periods.
- Stopped clusters restart automatically after 7 days.
Ways to reduce cost
- Switch to I/O-Optimized when I/O is a large share of cost.
- Use Serverless for dev/test or spiky clusters.
- Index for your query patterns to avoid collection scans.
- Use Graviton (r6g/r8g) instances.
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. DocumentDB has offered a one-month free trial to new DocumentDB customers (750 hours of t3/t4g.medium, 30 M I/O, 5 GB storage and backup). Eligibility for new-plan accounts should be checked. Otherwise paid from Free Tier credits.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon DocumentDB?
DocumentDB instance hours, Serverless DCU-hours, storage, I/O, backup beyond the free allowance, Elastic Clusters and Global Cluster replication 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 reserved instances, where offered.
- 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 | $63.23 | 158.2 mo. | 395.4 mo. | 1,581.5 mo. |
| Medium | $806.30 | 12.4 mo. | 31.0 mo. | 124.0 mo. |
| Large | $2,601.95 | 3.8 mo. | 9.6 mo. | 38.4 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
1 x db.t4g.medium, Standard storage 20 GB, 30 M I/O | db.t4g.medium: 730 hours x $0.07566 = $55.23; Storage: 20 GB-month x $0.1 = $2.00; I/O: 30 million x $0.2 = $6.00 | Total ~$63.23/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
3 x db.r6g.large (1 primary, 2 replicas), 300 GB, 1 B I/O | db.r6g.large: 2,190 hours x $0.26315 = $576.30; Storage: 300 GB-month x $0.1 = $30.00; I/O: 1,000 million x $0.2 = $200.00 | Total ~$806.30/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
3 x db.r8g.large x 2 clusters on I/O-Optimized, 4 TB storage, 2 TB extra backup | db.r8g.large I/O-Optimized: 4,380 hours x $0.303685 = $1,330.14; Storage (I/O-Optimized): 4,096 GB-month x $0.3 = $1,228.80; Backup beyond free: 2,048 GB-month x $0.021 = $43.01 | Total ~$2,601.95/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon DocumentDB pricing FAQ
Is DocumentDB MongoDB?
It is MongoDB-compatible (it implements the MongoDB API) but it is an AWS engine. Check compatibility of the drivers and features you use.
Standard or I/O-Optimized storage?
Standard bills $0.20 per million I/Os. I/O-Optimized has no I/O fee but higher instance and storage rates; it pays off for I/O-heavy clusters.
Is there a free tier?
There is a one-month free trial for new DocumentDB customers, not an ongoing Free Tier.
Do credits cover DocumentDB?
Yes, it is eligible usage.
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
- DocumentDB free trial details and eligibility for new-plan accounts are not confirmed.
- Runway prices come from the calculator repository snapshot rate card documentdb (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/documentdb/pricing/ before publishing.