Managed Database Cost Calculator
Compare real monthly costs: RDS vs Aurora vs Aurora Serverless vs PlanetScale vs Neon. See which managed database is actually cheapest for your workload.
Instance Size
Infrastructure Settings
100 GB
10 GB10 TB
730 hrs
1 hr730 hrs (full month)
1
05
100M / month
1M2,000M
Multi-AZ Deployment
High availability, 2× compute for RDS
PlanetScale Inputs
PlanetScale charges per row reads/writes, not compute time.
50B / month
1B1,000B
50M / month
1M200,000M
Cheapest For Your Workload
Aurora Provisioned
$171/mo
Monthly Cost Comparison
🟣Aurora ProvisionedCHEAPEST
$171/mo🟠RDS MySQL/PG
$175/mo🟢PlanetScale
$264/mo⚡Aurora Serverless
$608/mo🔵Neon
$892/moAnnual Cost
Aurora
$2,048
RDS
$2,105
PlanetScale
$3,168
Aurora
$7,298
Neon
$10,709
When to Use Each
● RDS — Stable load, broad engine support, lift-and-shift. Best if you need Oracle, MSSQL.
● Aurora — 5× faster than RDS MySQL, global clusters, demanding OLTP workloads.
● Aurora Serverless — Variable/bursty traffic, dev environments, scale-to-zero need.
● PlanetScale — Read-heavy MySQL apps, schema branching, no-downtime migrations.
● Neon — Postgres-only, previews/branches per PR, low-traffic apps needing scale-to-zero.
DEEP DIVE
RDS vs Aurora: The Real Cost Difference
When Aurora saves money vs when RDS wins — with real Q1 2026 pricing and I/O math →
Prices: Q1 2026, us-east-1 / on-demand. RDS gp2 storage. Aurora I/O pricing mode. PlanetScale Scaler Pro. Neon Scale plan. Egress not included. Methodology →