Scale to Zero

Traditionally, cloud services required users to predict their resource needs and provision servers based on those predictions. This often led to over-provisioning for potential peak loads and paying for unused resources during periods of low demand. Upstash solves this with two pricing models:

• Pay-as-you-go databases scale to zero: you’re billed per command, and an idle database costs $0.
• Fixed plans offer a flat monthly price with unlimited commands for sustained, high-throughput workloads.

Both run on the same high-performance production infrastructure.

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Pay for usage

On pay-as-you-go, you’re only charged for the commands you run ($0.20 per 100K commands). When your application has little or no traffic, you pay little or nothing. This is ideal for:

• Small teams and side projects that don’t want a fixed monthly bill
• Spiky traffic, where provisioning for peak would mean paying for idle capacity most of the time
• Prototypes and internal tools with low or intermittent usage

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Fixed plans for high throughput

Once your traffic is sustained, per-command billing may no longer be the best fit. Fixed plans start at $10/month and offer:

• Unlimited commands at a flat monthly price, so costs stay predictable no matter how much traffic you serve
• Higher throughput limits: up to 16,000 commands per second on larger fixed plans, and 100K+ commands per second with dedicated resources on Enterprise
• Graceful behavior under load: requests beyond your plan’s throughput limit are briefly queued instead of rejected, so traffic spikes don’t turn into errors

See Redis pricing for the full plan comparison, or a live throughput benchmark sustaining 16,000+ commands per second on a fixed plan.

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Scale up, not just down

Because scaling is automatic in both directions, you never manage capacity yourself. During traffic spikes, Upstash scales up to meet demand; during quiet periods, resources (and your bill, on pay-as-you-go) scale back down. You can start on the free tier, move to pay-as-you-go as you grow, and switch to a fixed plan once sustained throughput makes a flat price the cheaper, more predictable option.