Costs and Pricing – Don’t Let AWS Empty Your Wallet 💰

Hey noob! 👋
You’ve built, secured, and scaled your RDS database like a champ.
Now it’s time to talk about the most painful topic for developers — money 💸

Let’s break down how AWS charges you for RDS, so you don’t wake up to a scary bill.

🏷️ Pricing Components

RDS costs can be split into a few main components:

1. Instance Hours (Compute)

   • You pay for the DB instance class you choose.
   • Billed per hour or second depending on region.
   • Example: db.t3.micro is cheap, db.r6g.2xlarge is not 😅

2. Storage

   • You pay for allocated storage (in GB per month).
   • General Purpose SSD vs. Provisioned IOPS storage costs differently.

3. IO Requests

   • If you use Provisioned IOPS, you pay for the IOPS separately.
   • For GP2/GP3 SSD, read/write requests are usually included.

4. Backup Storage

   • Automated backups (up to your allocated storage) are free.
   • Extra backup storage costs money.

5. Data Transfer

   • Data inbound to RDS is free.
   • Data outbound (to the internet or other regions) costs money.

💡 Free Tier for Beginners

If you’re a noob (like you 😎) and just want to experiment:

• 750 hours/month of db.t3.micro instance for 12 months
• 20 GB of General Purpose SSD storage
• 20 GB backup storage

Basically, AWS lets you play without burning your wallet. But always check your usage — even small things add up!

🧮 Example Cost Calculation

Let’s say you run:

• db.t3.micro → ~$0.017/hour (varies by region)
• 20 GB storage → ~$2/month
• Automatic backups within free tier → $0

Monthly cost ≈ $12–15 (mostly free if under free tier!)

💬 Tip: Use AWS Pricing Calculator to estimate your bill before scaling.

🏁 TL;DR

Component	What You Pay For	Free Tier?
Instance Hours	CPU + RAM usage	750 hrs/month t3.micro
Storage	Allocated GB	20 GB SSD
IO Requests	High-performance storage	Included for GP2
Backup Storage	Extra snapshots beyond free	20 GB free
Data Transfer	Outbound traffic	No free tier