Skip to content

Serverless Relational Databases

TL;DR / when to use this: For hobby projects, serverless databases cost far less than an always-on RDS instance. The right pick depends on workload shape: variable workloads favor usage-based billing; intermittent workloads favor auto-pause; always-on favors committed use.

Comparison

Service Compute pricing Storage pricing Ideal for
Amazon Aurora Serverless Per ACU per second $0.10 / GB-month Variable workloads, MySQL/PostgreSQL compatibility
Azure SQL Database Serverless Per vCore per second (~$0.52/vCore-hour Gen5) Per GB Intermittent workloads with auto-scaling and pausing
Google Cloud SQL On-demand / committed use (~$0.0825/hour for 1 vCPU) $0.17 / GB-month SSD Managed relational DBs with automated scaling
PlanetScale Free tier; usage-based beyond Included in usage pricing MySQL-compatible with serverless scaling and modern dev features
CockroachDB Serverless Free tier; usage-based beyond Included in usage pricing PostgreSQL-compatible distributed SQL, high availability, global scaling

Notes from running these

  • PlanetScale was the go-to for hobby projects — free tier plus MySQL compatibility, though branching workflows matter more than raw pricing.
  • CockroachDB Serverless is the pick when you want Postgres semantics with HA without managing nodes.
  • Watch the cold-start/pause behavior on Azure and Aurora — a paused instance bills nothing but adds latency on wake.

See also