Amazon ElastiCache pricing calculator
Valkey, Redis & Memcached. 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 ElastiCache pricing works
What you pay for
- Node-based: per node-hour by node type and engine (Valkey is priced about 20% below Redis OSS/Memcached for the same node).
- Serverless: data stored per GB-hour and ElastiCache Processing Units (ECPUs); Valkey serverless is cheaper than Redis OSS serverless.
- Backup storage per GB-month, Global Datastore cross-Region transfer, cross-AZ traffic.
Common cost traps
- Serverless has a minimum billed data size (lower for Valkey than for Redis OSS), so many tiny caches cost more than expected.
- Replicas for high availability double or triple node cost.
- Cross-AZ traffic between clients and nodes in other AZs is billed per GB.
- Data tiering and large r-class nodes are easy to over-provision for small working sets.
Ways to reduce cost
- Use Valkey for new caches: lower node and serverless prices than Redis OSS in this data.
- Use reserved nodes (No Upfront) for long-lived clusters.
- Right-size from memory and CPU metrics; t4g nodes suit small caches.
- Set TTLs and eviction so the cache stays small.
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. Legacy accounts: 750 hours/month of cache.t1/t2/t3.micro node usage for 12 months. New-plan accounts pay from Free Tier credits.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon ElastiCache?
ElastiCache node hours (Valkey, Redis OSS, Memcached), Serverless data storage and ECPUs, backups, Global Datastore transfer and the hourly fee of No Upfront reserved nodes 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 nodes.
- 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 | $37.38 | 267.5 mo. | 668.8 mo. | 2,675.2 mo. |
| Medium | $311.20 | 32.1 mo. | 80.3 mo. | 321.3 mo. |
| Large | $1,151.06 | 8.7 mo. | 21.7 mo. | 86.9 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
2 x cache.t4g.small Valkey nodes (primary + replica) 24/7 | cache.t4g.small Valkey: 1,460 node-hours x $0.0256 = $37.38 | Total ~$37.38/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
ElastiCache Serverless for Valkey, 5 GB average stored, 2 B ECPUs per month | Serverless data storage: 3,650 GB-hours x $0.084 = $306.60; ECPUs: 2,000 million x $0.0023 = $4.60 | Total ~$311.20/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
Valkey cluster: 3 shards x (1 primary + 2 replicas) cache.r7g.large | cache.r7g.large Valkey: 6,570 node-hours x $0.1752 = $1,151.06 | Total ~$1,151.06/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon ElastiCache pricing FAQ
Valkey or Redis OSS?
Valkey is API-compatible with Redis OSS and AWS prices it lower: in this data a cache.r7g.large is $0.1752/hour on Valkey versus $0.219 on Redis OSS.
Serverless or nodes?
Serverless suits variable or unknown load and needs no sizing. Steady, large caches are usually cheaper on reserved nodes.
Are replicas billed?
Yes, each replica is a full node.
Do credits cover reserved nodes?
The hourly part of No Upfront reservations, yes; upfront payments, no.
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
- Serverless minimum billed data size (100 MB Valkey, 1 GB Redis OSS/Memcached) should be confirmed on the pricing page.
- Runway prices come from the calculator repository snapshot rate card elasticache (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/pricing/ before publishing.