Pricing behavior — Relational Databases Pricing

Pricing for Amazon Aurora (Postgres)

How pricing changes as you scale: upgrade triggers, cost cliffs, and plan structure (not a live price list).

Sources linked — see verification below.
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Cost cliffs Upgrade triggers Limits

Freshness & verification

Last updated 2026-02-09 Intel generated 2026-01-14 3 sources linked

Pricing behavior (not a price list)

These points describe when users typically pay more and what usage patterns trigger upgrades.

Actions that trigger upgrades

  • Need deeper AWS integration and managed database operations
  • Need to standardize database governance for multiple teams
  • Need a production baseline with clearer operational controls as reliability requirements increase

What gets expensive first

  • Database migrations and governance remain your responsibility
  • Performance tuning and cost management require disciplined ownership
  • Ecosystem alignment increases switching cost; plan for exit/migration strategy early
  • Cost visibility requires tagging/budgets and operational discipline

Plans and variants (structural only)

Grouped by type to show structure, not to rank or recommend SKUs.

Plans
  • Compute - provisioned instances - Billed by instance size/region; HA and read replicas add cost.
  • Storage + I/O - separate drivers - Storage, backups, and I/O/operations can materially change total cost.
  • Availability - pay for resilience - Multi-AZ/high availability configurations increase reliability and spend.
  • Official pricing: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/

Next step: constraints + what breaks first

Pricing tells you the cost cliffs; constraints tell you what forces a redesign.

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Sources & verification

Pricing and behavioral information comes from public documentation and structured research. When information is incomplete or volatile, we prefer to say so rather than guess.

  1. https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/ ↗
  2. https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/ ↗
  3. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/ ↗