| Provider | $/mo estimate ▼ | Model | $/100k commands | $/GB RAM/mo | Free tier | Open/self-host | Trustpilot | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Serverless or reserved?
Serverless (Upstash) bills per command — if traffic is sparse or spiky (e.g. background jobs, dev, small apps), you pay only for use and idle is free. But at high steady volume per-request quickly becomes more expensive than a fixed instance. Reserved (DigitalOcean, Redis Cloud, ElastiCache…) costs the same every month by RAM — predictable, but you also pay for idle time.
Remember: Redis keeps data in memory, so a large dataset is expensive — consider what really needs to be cached. Valkey (BSD-licensed Redis fork) is now the default for many providers after the licensing dispute and is fully compatible. Open options can be self-hosted (on a VPS) for full control. Also compare databases (persistent data) and serverless (compute).
How to choose?
Variable/small traffic: Upstash serverless — free tier (500k commands/mo) and $0.20/100k after; ideal for edge apps and development. Steady production traffic: reserved instance — UpCloud Valkey (1 GB €8) and AWS ElastiCache are affordable at small size, DigitalOcean linearly ~$15/GB, Aiven (Finnish-backed) and Redis Cloud offer free tiers to try.
Ecosystem and EU data protection: if you are on AWS/GCP/Azure, same-cloud managed Redis (ElastiCache/Memorystore/Azure Cache) integrates tightest — but Memorystore is the most expensive per GB in this comparison. UpCloud, Aiven and Scaleway are strong EU options. Always check whether you need replication/HA (raises price) or one node is enough, and estimate command volume before choosing serverless.