# Amazon Aurora Pricing (AWS) — On-Demand & Reserved

> On-demand and reserved monthly pricing for every Amazon Aurora (AWS) instance, across Aurora PostgreSQL and Aurora MySQL, in every region.

Source: https://www.bytebase.com/dbcost/aurora-pricing/

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## How Amazon Aurora pricing works

Aurora separates compute from storage. You pay for each database instance in the cluster - the writer and every reader - by the hour, and for shared cluster storage on top. On-demand is pay-as-you-go with no commitment, shown as a monthly figure (hourly rate x 730). Reserved instances commit you to an instance type for one or three years in exchange for a lower rate; the effective monthly cost is the cheapest all-upfront term amortized over the lease.

Storage and I/O are billed separately from the instance. Under Aurora Standard you pay for cluster storage (~$0.10/GB-month) plus I/O per million requests; Aurora I/O-Optimized folds I/O into a higher instance and storage rate (roughly 30% more on compute) and is cheaper for I/O-heavy workloads. Backups, snapshots, and data transfer are billed on top and vary by region.

Aurora offers only burstable (t) and memory-optimized (r, x) families - there is no general-purpose (m) tier as on RDS. AWS Graviton (ARM) instances - the t4g, r6g, r7g, and r8g families - are generally cheaper than their x86 equivalents. The interactive table at https://www.bytebase.com/dbcost/aurora-pricing lets you filter by category, architecture, and generation, switch region and engine, and sort by on-demand or reserved price.

## Amazon Aurora pricing FAQ

### How much does Amazon Aurora cost?

On-demand Amazon Aurora starts around $53/month for a burstable db.t4g.medium instance (Aurora PostgreSQL, us-east-1) and scales to over twenty thousand per month for the largest memory-optimized instances. That is the compute price only - Aurora bills cluster storage and I/O separately. Reserved instances lower the effective rate for a 1- or 3-year commitment.

### What is the difference between on-demand and reserved Aurora pricing?

On-demand has no commitment and is billed per instance-hour, best for variable or short-lived workloads. Reserved instances commit you to an instance type for 1 or 3 years and cut the effective monthly cost substantially.

### Does the price include Aurora storage and I/O?

No. The price is for the database instance (compute) only. Aurora bills cluster storage (~$0.10/GB-month) and, under Aurora Standard, I/O per million requests separately. Backups, snapshots, and data transfer are billed on top.

### What is the difference between Aurora Standard and Aurora I/O-Optimized?

The table shows Aurora Standard instance rates. Aurora I/O-Optimized charges a higher instance and storage rate (roughly 30% more on compute) but removes the per-request I/O charge - cheaper for I/O-heavy workloads. Instance families and sizes are identical between the two.

### What is the cheapest Amazon Aurora instance?

The burstable db.t4g.medium is the cheapest current-generation option (about $53/month on-demand in us-east-1). Aurora offers only burstable (t) and memory-optimized (r, x) families - no general-purpose (m) tier. Graviton (ARM) families are generally cheaper than their x86 equivalents.

### Is Amazon Aurora pricing the same in every region?

No. Rates vary by AWS region; us-east-1 (N. Virginia) is usually among the cheapest.

### Does Amazon Aurora have a free tier?

Provisioned Aurora is not part of the 12-month AWS Free Tier (unlike RDS db.t2/t3/t4g.micro). Aurora Serverless v2, billed per ACU-hour, is priced separately.

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