Managed Redis Pricing Comparison: $69 to $200, Verified

Ask seven managed Redis providers for a 6 GB cache and you get seven different answers: 6 GB, 6.38 GiB, 6.5 GB, 8 GB, 8 GiB, a 10 GB tier and a 12 GB plan. That is before anyone mentions replicas or regions.

Which makes a managed Redis pricing comparison surprisingly hard to do honestly. So we did it ourselves: all seven providers against the same 6 GB requirement, in two regions, with and without a replica, every figure taken from the vendor’s own calculator.

Why 6 GB? Because it is a realistic size for a production cache, and the point where the ladders stop lining up. At 1 GB almost every provider has something directly comparable. At 6 GB not one of them matches another.

Three things decide what your Redis actually costs: whether you run a replica, which region you are in, and the gap between the size you need and the size that is available. The advertised price tells you none of them.

Key facts

One workload: 6 GB of Redis, single node, on-demand pricing, us-east-1. Seven providers, each priced on their own calculator, 17 to 18 September 2026.

• Cheapest: $68.49/mo. Selfhost.dev t4g.large (2 vCPU / 8 GB), us-east-1, single node
• Most expensive: $200/mo. Upstash Fixed 10 GB, the smallest plan that holds 6 GB
• The gap: 2.9x. Same data, same job, nearly triple the bill depending on where you put it
• Add one replica: The whole picture reorders. Range becomes $137 to $400. AWS, Azure, Google, DigitalOcean and Selfhost.dev double, Upstash adds $200 flat, Redis Cloud adds $5. Redis Cloud starts $79 above Azure and ends $30 below it
• Nobody sells 6 GB: Redis Cloud rounds you up to a 12 GB plan, Upstash to a 10 GB tier. You pay for headroom you did not ask for
• Region matters: Up to 32% swing between us-east-1 and ap-south-1, and it goes both ways depending on the provider

Selfhost.dev is a managed Redis provider running on AWS. At the 6 GB configuration used in this comparison, Selfhost.dev is the lowest-priced option in the table below. Every competitor figure came from that vendor’s own calculator rather than from a published comparison, because several of the numbers checked against did not hold.

Managed Redis pricing comparison: what does 6 GB cost?

A 6 GB managed Redis cache costs between $68.49 and $200 a month on a single node in us-east-1, across the seven major managed Redis providers. Add one replica and the same providers range from $137 to $400. The two rankings are not the same list, and the provider that moves furthest moves four places.

Read the memory column alongside the price. Only Azure sells exactly 6 GB. Everyone else rounds, and the last column shows what that rounding costs once you divide by the 6 GB you actually store. Selfhost.dev and DigitalOcean both hand you 8 GB for a 6 GB dataset, at $11.42 and $20.00 per usable gigabyte. Azure sells exactly 6 GB at $18.98.

Redis Cloud and Upstash have no 6 GB tier at all, so a 6 GB dataset forces you onto a 12 GB plan and a 10 GB tier respectively. That is not a configuration we chose for them. It is the smallest thing they sell that holds the data. Upstash goes from 5 GB at $100 straight to 10 GB at $200, and Redis Cloud has nothing between 5 GB and 12 GB. One extra gigabyte of data, twice the bill.

And the order is not stable. On a single node, Redis Cloud costs $79 more than Azure. Add a replica to both and Redis Cloud costs $30 less. Neither service changed. Replication costs Redis Cloud $5 and costs Azure $113.88, and that one difference is enough to swap them.

These are us-east-1 prices, and the same comparison in ap-south-1 produces a different order again.

Why does high availability double your Redis bill?

A replica doubles your bill because it is a second full node billed at the primary’s rate, not a discount on the first. That holds on Selfhost.dev, AWS ElastiCache, Azure Managed Redis, Google Memorystore and DigitalOcean. Upstash and Redis Cloud charge for it a different way, and at 6 GB the gap between those two approaches is $195 a month.

Three billing models, and they behave very differently as you grow. That is why a comparison at one size tells you so little.

Per-node providers: a replica is a second full node

Per-node providers charge you whatever the node costs. The replica is a clone, so the fee scales with everything else: memory, CPU, region. On a larger Azure M10, that is $157.68 becoming $315.36. On Google’s Standard-Small, $117.53 becoming $235.06. Predictable, and it never gets proportionally cheaper.

Upstash: a flat $200, whatever the size of the database

Upstash charges a flat fee that ignores your size entirely. Multi-zone high availability is not in any Upstash plan. It comes with a Prod Pack add-on at $200 a month per database, whether that database is 250 MB or 100 GB. On the 10 GB plan, it happens to look like a doubling. On the 250 MB plan at $10, it is a 21x increase.

That flat fee deserves a moment. Upstash charges $200 for the high-availability option alone. A complete replicated 6 GB setup, both nodes, costs $137.00 on Selfhost.dev and $184.54 on ElastiCache running Valkey. The entire service costs less than the option to make one highly available.

Redis Cloud: $5, because the headroom was already paid for

Redis Cloud charges almost nothing, because you have already paid. Replication on the 12 GB Essentials plan takes it from $193 to $198. Five dollars. But Redis Cloud bills usable memory rather than hardware, and the 12 GB plan is the smallest one that holds a 6 GB dataset in the first place. The headroom was bought up front, so the replica has somewhere to go without a new invoice line.

Why the cheapest single node stays the cheapest pair

Replication does not disturb the order at the top. At 6 GB with a replica, Selfhost.dev is $137.00 against $184.54 for the next cheapest, a gap of $47.54 a month. That is arithmetic rather than a discount. A replica costs whatever the node costs, so the cheapest node necessarily has the cheapest replica, and the gap widens in absolute terms rather than closing. Doubling a small number leaves it small.

Azure’s cheaper column is one Microsoft tells you not to run

One thing to know before reading Azure’s single-node figure. Microsoft’s own documentation states that you should “only disable high availability for dev/test scenarios.” So the honest Azure number for production is $227.76, and $113.88 is a price their own docs tell you not to run on.

Across all seven providers, that is the first reason an advertised price misleads. It is quoted for a single node, and three of these vendors either do not expect you to run one or do not sell high availability as part of the plan at all.

Does managed Redis cost more in some regions than others?

Yes, and on some providers it is worth a third of the bill. The same 6 GB cache moved from us-east-1 to ap-south-1 costs 32% less on Selfhost.dev and 8% less on Google Memorystore. On AWS, Azure and Redis Cloud, the same move costs a little more, and on DigitalOcean and Upstash, nothing changes at all.

Single-node monthly prices for the same 6 GB workload in two regions. Azure’s equivalents are East US and West India, Google’s are us-east1 and asia-south1. DigitalOcean and Upstash publish one price for every region.

This matters because region is one of the few inputs you actually control. A cache in front of a user-facing API has to sit near the users. A cache backing a job queue, a staging environment, a batch pipeline or an internal tool usually does not, and for those workloads the region is a free choice that costs you nothing to make.

On Selfhost.dev, moving that same 6 GB cache from us-east-1 to ap-south-1 takes it from $68.49 to $46.74. That is $21.75 a month, or $261 a year. Run it with a replica and the saving doubles to $522 a year.

Nothing about the cache changes. Same instance type, same memory, same configuration, and nobody has to work differently. Selfhost.dev prices each region against what the hardware actually costs there rather than publishing one rate for everywhere, which is why the gap is large enough to be worth a decision.

That lever does not exist everywhere. Moving the same 6 GB node between us-east-1 and ap-south-1 changes an ElastiCache bill by $4.38 a month. On DigitalOcean and Upstash, it changes nothing at all, because both publish one price for every region. For those three, region is a latency decision and nothing more.

Which is the second reason an advertised price misleads. It tells you what one region costs. It tells you nothing about whether the others cost the same, and across these seven providers the answer ranges from identical to a third cheaper. You cannot tell which you are dealing with by looking at the price.

When is the advertised price the right number?

Not every cache needs all of this. There are four situations where the simple number is the number you will pay, and in three of them someone else is the better buy.

A development or staging cache does not need a replica. If losing it means a slow page rather than an incident, read the single-node column and ignore the rest. Azure is the only provider that puts this in writing, but it holds everywhere.

If the cache sits idle most of the month, Upstash wins and it is not close. Their pay-as-you-go model charges $0.25 per GB-month of storage with the first gigabyte free, so a 6 GB cache serving no traffic costs $1.25 a month. A dedicated node costs its hourly rate whether it is busy or not. Below roughly 24 commands a second sustained, per-command billing beats a node of any kind, Selfhost.dev included.

Upstash also has a free tier you can run indefinitely: 256 MB and 500,000 commands a month, no card and no expiry. Selfhost.dev does not have one and this post will not pretend otherwise.

Two smaller ones. DigitalOcean does not meter data transfer at all, where Selfhost.dev bills egress at $0.15 per GB. And Azure absorbs the public IPv4 charge and the bandwidth for geo-replication, where Selfhost.dev adds about $5 a month for an IPv4.

How much does a 6 GB Redis cache cost per month?

A 6 GB Redis cache with one replica costs between $137 and $400 a month depending on provider and region. Your own number comes from three steps in order: take the price of the smallest plan that actually holds your data, multiply by your replica count plus one, then adjust for region.

Run through on Selfhost.dev: a t4g.large is 2 vCPU and 8 GB, which holds 6 GB with headroom. In us-east-1 that is $66.23 of compute and $2.27 of gp3 storage, so $68.49. The replica doubles both lines to $137.00. Move the pair to ap-south-1 and the same setup is $93.47. A public IPv4 adds about $5 at deploy and is not in those figures.

Only the multiplier changes between providers. It is exactly two on AWS, Azure, Google, DigitalOcean and Selfhost.dev. Upstash adds $200 flat instead of doubling. Redis Cloud is the one provider where you should read the replicated figure rather than multiply it, because its matrix prices replication directly and charges $5 for it. Step one is where people lose money: the plan whose name matches your number is often not the plan that holds your data.

Three inputs, one number.

The Selfhost.dev pricing calculator takes your memory, region and replica count and returns the monthly figure with compute and storage itemised. It runs without an account, and the link reopens the exact configuration so you can send it to whoever signs off the bill.

Which Redis are you actually buying?

The seven providers here do not all sell the same software. Since Redis changed its licence in 2024, the field has split four ways, and the engine you get was mostly decided for you. Redis 7.2 is the last fully open-source version, and Valkey is the Linux Foundation fork of it.

Engine versions as published by each vendor, checked 17 to 18 September 2026.

The cheapest row in a price table usually invites one question: what is the catch. Selfhost.dev publishes measured numbers rather than asserting performance.

Selfhost.dev Redis benchmark

• Instance: r7g.large, 2 vCPU / 16 GB
• Throughput: 230,293 operations per second, pipelined
• P99 latency: 0.88 ms on a single connection
• At 200 concurrent connections: about 76,000 operations per second
• Method: memtier with HDR histograms, over a real cross-VPC network path
• Full percentile table and exact method: selfhost.dev/benchmarks/

Those figures come from a 16 GB instance rather than the 6 GB configuration used above, and the benchmark page states what was not tested as well as what was. No other provider in this comparison publishes measured latency of its own.

Look before you commit.

The live demo runs the real console with no signup and no card, so you can see how a Redis instance is provisioned and what the metrics look like before deciding anything. When you want your own, the console starts with $5 in credit and no card.

Why did my Redis bill suddenly increase?

A Redis bill can double overnight without a price change or a configuration change, because the meter changed rather than the price. On 6 February 2026, an Azure Managed Redis customer running a B3 Balanced instance with high availability in North Europe reported daily cost going from about 500 yen to about 1,500 yen from 1 January, with nothing altered on their side.

The reply on Microsoft’s own Q&A forum was direct about one thing: “There is no evidence that Microsoft increased the price of Azure Managed Redis on January 1.” Which was true, and did not answer the question. The suggested causes were a high-availability replica meter that had not been billing until that date, worth roughly a doubling on its own, a billing correction that shipped globally the same day, and a currency adjustment.

Nobody could tell the customer which of the three it was. From their side it does not matter. The bill tripled, there was no warning, and the money was going to a second node that had been running all along.

This is what we call Bill Variance: how much the same setup swings between a quiet month and a busy one, measured as (busy − quiet) ÷ quiet. Node-based pricing scores near zero on it, because a node costs the same whether it is saturated or idle. Per-request pricing is where it bites.

Upstash’s own published rates put a 6 GB cache at $1.25 in a month with no traffic and about $201 at 100 million commands, the same data either way. That is a bill variance of 160.

A low score is not the same as a fixed bill, which is what the Azure case above shows. The node price holds steady and the invoice still moves.

Selfhost.dev’s answer is not that it is immune. The bill is a known hourly rate against prepaid credits, it stops when you pause the instance, and it cannot exceed the balance you put in.

Find out what you are actually paying now.

We will read your current Redis bill line by line and tell you where the money is going, including the parts that are not the node. Get the free cost audit with no obligation and no sales call attached.

Which one should you actually pick?

Pick Upstash if the cache is quiet, spiky, or genuinely idle most of the month. At 6 GB with no traffic it costs $1.25, and below roughly 24 commands a second it beats every dedicated node here, ours included. It is also the only one with a free tier you can run indefinitely.

Pick Redis Cloud if you need RediSearch, RedisJSON or Active-Active writes across regions. Valkey does not have them and nor do we. Replicated at 6 GB it comes to $198, below Azure, Google Memorystore and ElastiCache on Redis OSS, which is not where its advertised price puts it.

Pick your own cloud’s service if the cache has to sit inside an existing VPC, identity and invoice, and that integration is worth $30 to $100 a month to you. It frequently is.

Pick Selfhost.dev if the cache runs steadily, you want the replica priced honestly rather than discovered later, and you want the bill to stop when you pause it. At 6 GB that is $68.49 a month in us-east-1 and $46.74 in ap-south-1, replicated at $137.00 and $93.47, on a dedicated AWS instance with backups, snapshots and encryption at rest included.

Six gigabytes, one replica, your region.

Deploy a Redis instance with $5 in credit and no card required. It bills by the hour against that balance and pauses to zero when you stop it, so the first month costs whatever you actually run.

Frequently Asked Questions