Aurora serverless starts at 100$ month

Aurora Serverless initially seemed like my new favorite friend. Pay-as-you-go Postgres is what’s missing in my hobby dev life. But there is a two-punch killer combo that makes it unusable for any personal project budget, none of them easily found in the documentation.

20+ second cold startups

AWS Aurora serverless v1 (and v2) both have 20+ second cold startups (in my tiny project). 1, 2

100$ per month is the first scale level.

A minimum, always-on capacity – likely removing the cold startup wait time, starts at 0.08$/hour/ACU. Since 2 ACU is the minumum, it ends up at 2 ACU * 0.08$/h _ 24 _ 30 = 115$ /month.

I guess it’s still nice when you got the budget?

Not having to worry at all about scale, and paying per use is lovely. But Aurora Serverless is not suitable for my pet projects.

I guess I’d know that if I’d read the fine print in the best practices:

Some applications may require a fast resume. Resuming the cluster takes a few seconds and in some cases can be longer based on variables such as your ACU, storage size, and more. To avoid a cold start, consider disabling auto pause and, as discussed in the previous section, set the proper minimum capacity.