Billing for Amazon Redshift Serverless

You can purchase on-demand capacity – When you choose on-demand compute capacity, you pay for resources as you go. This is the best choice if you're just beginning to use Amazon Redshift Serverless or if you don't have a good sense yet of your steady usage patterns. On-demand offers the most flexibility. For more information, see Billing for on-demand compute capacity.

You can purchase reservations – A reservation provides a discount when you buy a preset amount of compute resources for a specific amount of time, for example for a year. It's a good idea when you know you're going to use an amount of capacity steadily. It's helpful for saving money when you can forecast some of your capacity needs. For more information, see Billing for serverless reservations.

Recording usage - A query or transaction is only metered and recorded after the transaction completes, is rolled back, or stopped. For instance, if a transaction runs for two days, RPU usage is recorded after it completes. You can monitor ongoing use in real time by querying sys_serverless_usage. Transaction recording may reflect as RPU usage variation and effect costs for specific hours and for daily use.

Writing explicit transactions - It's important as a best practice to end transactions. If you don't end or roll back an open transaction, Amazon Redshift Serverless continues to use RPUs. For example, if you write an explicit BEGIN TRAN, it's important to have corresponding COMMIT and ROLLBACK statements.

Cancelled queries - If you run a query and cancel it before it finishes, you are still billed for the time the query ran.

Scaling - The Amazon Redshift Serverless instance may initiate scaling for handling periods of higher load, in order to maintain consistent performance. Your Amazon Redshift Serverless billing includes both base compute and scaled capacity at the same RPU rate.

Scaling down - Amazon Redshift Serverless scales up from its base RPU capacity to handle periods of higher load. In some cases, RPU capacity can remain at a higher setting for a period after query load falls. We recommend that you set maximum RPU hours in the console to guard against unexpected cost.

System tables - When you query a system table, the query time is billed.

Redshift Spectrum - When you have Amazon Redshift Serverless, and you run queries, there isn't a separate charge for data-lake queries. For queries on data stored in Amazon S3, the charge is the same, by transaction time, as queries on local data.

Federated queries - Federated queries are charged in terms of RPUs used over a specific time interval, in the same manner as queries on the data warehouse or data lake.

Storage - Storage is billed separately, by GB / month.

Minimum charge - The minimum charge is for 60 seconds of resource usage, metered on a per-second basis.

Snapshot billing - Snapshot billing doesn't change. It's charged according to storage, billed at a rate of GB / month. You can restore your data warehouse to specific points in the last 24 hours at a 30 minute granularity, free of charge. For more information, see Amazon Redshift pricing.

Make sure to end each transaction. When you use BEGIN to start a transaction, it's important to END it as well.

Use best-practice error handling to respond gracefully to errors and end each transaction. Minimizing open transactions helps to avoid unnecessary RPU use.

Use SESSION TIMEOUT to help end open transactions and idle sessions. It causes any session kept idle or inactive for more than 3600 seconds (1 hour) to time out. It causes any transaction kept open and inactive for more than 21600 seconds (6 hours) to time out. This timeout setting can be changed explicitly for a specific user, such as when you want to keep a session open for a long-running query. The topic CREATE USER shows how to adjust SESSION TIMEOUT for a user.