Estimate Aurora MySQL/PostgreSQL costs with Serverless v2 and provisioned pricing.
Last verified: May 2026
Serverless v2: $0.12/ACU-hour, estimated at 4 ACUs average usage.
$0.20 per million I/O operations.
Output will appear here...Your team's PostgreSQL on RDS handles ~500 GB with 1M I/O requests/hour at peak. The naive Aurora migration uses Standard storage = $580/month compute + $580/month I/O = $1,160/month. The estimator suggests I/O-Optimized: $750/month compute (higher rate) + $0 I/O + $115 storage (higher rate but smaller component) = $865/month — saves $295/month for the same workload. Plus Aurora's 5x throughput allows the team to drop one read replica, saving another $200/month.
Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database engine that offers up to five times the throughput of standard MySQL and three times the throughput of standard PostgreSQL. Aurora comes in two capacity modes: provisioned (you choose instance sizes) and Serverless v2 (Aurora scales compute automatically between a minimum and maximum ACU range). Costs include compute instances or ACUs, storage (billed per GB-month with automatic scaling), I/O operations, backup retention beyond one day, and optional features like Global Database and cross-region replicas. This estimator helps you model total Aurora costs for both capacity modes.
The estimator computes Aurora cost across components: provisioned compute (instance class hours × rate, with optional RI discount and Multi-AZ doubling) OR Serverless v2 (ACU-hours × rate based on min/max range and utilization), storage (GB-month × rate, automatically scaled), I/O (per-million requests for Standard, included for I/O-Optimized), backups (free up to DB size, then per GB-month), Global Database (per-region replica + cross-region transfer), and read replicas. Output presents per-component breakdown.
Aurora I/O-Optimized is the right choice when I/O charges exceed 25% of your Aurora bill. The breakeven moves up the storage rate but eliminates per-I/O charges entirely. Run the estimator with both modes against your actual workload — the answer is workload-specific.
Aurora Serverless v2 minimum ACU = 0.5 means you ALWAYS pay for at least 0.5 ACU = ~$43/month per database, even with zero traffic. For dev/test databases that sit truly idle, this is more expensive than a stopped provisioned instance. Set min ACU to 0 (with auto-pause) for dev/test workloads.
Reserved Instances for Aurora are 1- or 3-year commitments at 30-60% discount. For steady production workloads with at least 80% baseline utilization, RIs are a no-brainer. Below 80% utilization, you're paying for capacity you don't use — Serverless v2 may be cheaper despite the per-ACU premium.
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