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Amazon ElastiCache pricing calculator
Price an ElastiCache cache the way AWS bills it: nodes by the hour, or Serverless by the data you store and the ECPUs your requests use. Every number is shown twice, on Valkey and on Redis OSS, because the same cache costs 20% less on Valkey nodes and about a third less on Valkey Serverless.
Estimated monthly bill on Valkey
$0
Prices for US East (N. Virginia), On-Demand, from aws.amazon.com/elasticache/pricing and the AWS Price List, checked 2026-10-28. A month is 730 hours. Serverless: Valkey $0.084 per GB-hour and $0.0023 per million ECPUs, minimum 100 MB per cache; Redis OSS $0.125 per GB-hour and $0.0034 per million ECPUs, minimum 1 GB. A simple read or write uses 1 ECPU per KB transferred, at least 1; complex commands use more. Snapshot storage $0.085 per GB-month beyond the free allowance. Not included: data transfer across Availability Zones ($0.01 per GB each way), Reserved nodes, Memcached, Global Datastore, data tiering nodes, Extended Support for old Redis versions.
Why the bill grows
On a node-based cluster you pay for every node, every hour, full or empty. The usual setup is a primary and one replica so a failure doesn't take the cache down, which already doubles the line. Turn on cluster mode with three shards and that is six nodes. A lot of small apps run a cluster sized for a launch that never needed it.
Serverless looks cheap until you read the minimum. AWS bills at least 1 GB of data stored per Redis OSS cache, which is $91.25 a month at $0.125 per GB-hour even if the cache holds 20 MB. On Valkey the minimum is 100 MB, about $6.13 a month. For staging environments and side projects, that one line decides it.
The request side of Serverless is measured in ECPUs, and size matters: a 3.2 KB read is 3.2 ECPUs. Caching whole rendered pages or big JSON blobs costs more per request than caching ids and small objects. If the ECPU line is the big one, look at what you store, not how often you read it.
And the line no page shows you: traffic between Availability Zones. A replica in another zone, or app servers spread across zones reading from one primary, pay $0.01 per GB each way. On a busy cache that can rival the node cost.
Moving an existing Redis OSS cache to Valkey on ElastiCache is an engine upgrade AWS supports in place, and the commands and client libraries stay the same. We wrote up the differences that do matter, like data files from Redis 7.4 and later, in Valkey vs Redis. If your ElastiCache bill looks bigger than this page says it should be, send us the bill.