Introducing Developer Tier for Aiven for PostgreSQL® services

Aiven is introducing a new pricing plan for Aiven for PostgreSQL® services. Starting at $8 USD per month, the Developer tier offers more storage, so you can scale up your free PostgreSQL service in a cost-effective way. Unlike the Free tier, services on the Developer tier are not automatically powered off if inactive. The Developer tier also automatically includes Basic support services.

More information on the Developer tier is available in the Aiven docs.

What do I get with the Developer tier?

Compared to the Free tier, you still get a single node, with 1 CPU per virtual machine, monitoring and backups. But beyond that:

• Increased storage from 1GB to a maximum of 8GB.
• Basic tier support.
• Inactive services don’t automatically power off, meaning that your database will always be up and running, even if there’s no traffic to it.

See the documentation for full technical details.

If your database needs are more specific, you can easily switch and scale to the Professional plans, where you get additional benefits including the ability to choose a specific cloud provider and region for your service, the option for more nodes, even more disk space, longer backup, integrations with other services, forking and much more. Find out more in the Aiven for PostgreSQL documentation.

Why three tiers?

We originally started out with our selection of paid service plans, which you can now find neatly grouped under the Professional tier.

We introduced the Free tier as a way of paying back to our community, providing a way to start and host your non critical PostgreSQL infrastructure on Aiven, and creating a great way to learn about using a database in the cloud.

Now we’ve introduced the Developer tier as a cost-effective choice between those two. The Developer tier inherits some traits from the free tier and enhances it with some features you might find useful for your more advanced needs at a lower price point compared to our Professional plans.

You can choose the balance that suits your project:

• Free to explore and learn the platform and PostgreSQL in the cloud at no cost.
• Developer as a cost-effective option for test and personal projects.
• Professional for highly available business-critical workloads.

And as your project grows, there’s always an upgrade path available.

Questions you might ask

• Do I get to choose where the service runs?

  As with the Free tier, you can choose the geographical area (Asia Pacific, Australia, Europe or North America), but not the cloud provider or region. If that’s a requirement, the selection is available in the Professional level plans.

• Can I go (back) to the Free tier?

  If your service data will fit in the smaller instance size (1GB disk instead of 8GB), then it’s always possible to downgrade a service to the Free tier. See the documentation for how to Change a service plan.

• Can I upgrade to the Professional tier?

  Yes, it’s always possible to upgrade to a higher tier. See the documentation for how to Change a service plan.

• Should I use a Developer tier service in production?

  As it says in the description in the Aiven Console, the Developer tier is intended to be “A cost-effective option for test and personal projects”.

  The Developer tier provides a working PostgreSQL environment with basic daily backup and Basic level support, but without advanced networking, point in time recovery, forking, integrations, or cloud provider and region selection. If any of the above features are interesting for you, then please look in the Professional plans.

• Why is this just for PostgreSQL?

  We started with adding this new tier for Aiven for PostgreSQL because we’re confident that our users will find it useful. We do have ideas for other services - keep tuned to see what we announce in the future.

Try it out!

If you’re creating a new Aiven for PostgreSQL service and know that a Free service isn’t enough, but you don’t need all the resources of the Professional “Hobbyist” plan, then start a Developer service instead.

If you’ve got an existing Free tier Aiven for PostgreSQL service that could use just that bit more disk space, or that you only use intermittently, or if you want some support, then consider upgrading to the Developer tier.

And of course, if you’ve got an existing Hobbyist service that feels over-provisioned, you’ve now got the option of downgrading to Developer (although please do read the documentation to check that everything you need is still provided).

Find out more in the Aiven Console, or check out the documentation.