A side project with real users
A Django or Rails app with a handful of daily visitors, on a database that's still there tomorrow.
developer tier
Affordable, Fully-Managed PostgreSQL & MySQL Hosting
$5/month for an always-on, dedicated database. Managed PostgreSQL® and MySQL® with daily backups and real support — no hidden fees, no surprise bills.
Get building
$5/month · one-click upgrade to any plan
Cheap managed PostgreSQL hosting without the cheap infrastructure
Enjoy the same dedicated infrastructure and orchestration layer used in our Business and Enterprise plans.
Full compatibility
Includes full PostgreSQL extension support (PostGIS, pg_stat_statements) and native MySQL drivers.
Zero-Downtime
Version and plan upgrades happen without losing data or configuration.
Simple Costs
Pricing is based solely on compute resources.
What’s included in the Developer Tier
With Aiven's hosted Developer Tier for PostgreSQL® and MySQL®, you get a dedicated virtual machine with encryption, daily backups and real support, sized for development and personal projects.
Feature | |
|---|---|
Dedicated VMs | 1 |
CPU per VM | 1 |
RAM per VM | 1 GB |
Total storage | 8 GB |
All networking costs included | ✓ |
Seamless upgrade to other plans | ✓ |
One-click version upgrade | ✓ |
Data encrypted on disk and network | ✓ |
Backups | Daily backup to a remote location, for disaster recovery |
Point-in-time recovery (PITR) | Not included — available on Professional plans |
What the Developer Tier is good for
A few common cases. All of them need a database that doesn't disappear when nobody's looking at it.
A bot's database
The Discord or Telegram bot that has to stay connected 24/7. The free tier's idle shutdown makes this one impossible; this is the single clearest reason to spend the $5.
A staging environment
Mirror your production schema on a cheap, always-on instance, without touching your production bill.
The Developer Tier is a dedicated, single-node PostgreSQL or MySQL database for $5 per month. You get 1 CPU, 1 GB of RAM and 8 GB of storage on a dedicated virtual machine, with data encrypted on disk and over the network, a daily backup for disaster recovery, and Basic support. All networking costs are included.
At $5/month it's the most affordable managed PostgreSQL and MySQL hosting Aiven offers. Unlike a cheap self-hosted setup, the price includes patching, daily backups, encryption and support — things you'd otherwise build and maintain yourself.
No — the Developer Tier is a paid plan starting at $5 USD per month. It sits between the Free Tier, which offers limited-resource options for a free PostgreSQL database and a free MySQL database with no support, and our Professional plans, which add high availability and more resources.
The Developer Tier gives you a dedicated virtual machine rather than a shared one, which means your CPU and memory aren't competing with other tenants. It's a single-node service without an SLA, so it's built for development and personal projects rather than production.
Yes — Aiven is a fully managed service, so hosting is included. We provision and manage the underlying cloud infrastructure as well as the database software. You don't need to bring your own cloud account or manage any servers.
Yes — Developer Tier services run 24/7. Unlike the Free Tier, where services are powered off after periods of inactivity, your Developer Tier database stays available to your application without needing to be reactivated.
No — the Developer Tier is intended for development, testing and personal projects. Because it's a single-node service, it does not offer high availability or an uptime SLA. For production and mission-critical workloads we recommend our Business or Premium plans, which include multi-node clusters and a 99.99% uptime SLA. (Curious how our production tiers scale? See our PostgreSQL performance benchmarks across clouds.)
Yes — every Developer Tier service includes an automated daily backup to a remote location, for disaster recovery. Point-in-time recovery (PITR) and database forking are available on our Professional plans.
You choose the general geographic area — North America, Europe or Asia Pacific — but not a specific cloud provider or region. If you need a particular provider (AWS, Google Cloud or Azure) or a named region, our Professional plans give you the full choice.
The Developer Tier is available for Aiven for PostgreSQL® and Aiven for MySQL. We're continuing to evaluate adding more services to this tier.
The Developer Tier includes Basic support — ticket access to the Aiven Support Team, with responses typically on a next-business-day basis. Free Tier services are supported by documentation only, and Professional plans offer higher support tiers with faster response targets.
Yes — you can upgrade from the Developer Tier to any Professional or Business plan in one click from the Aiven Console, at any time. Your data and connection strings stay the same through the transition.
Any of them — a Developer Tier database works with the rest of the Aiven platform over standard connections. You can connect it to services like the free Apache Kafka® tier or a paid OpenSearch® cluster to build a complete data pipeline.
Stop managing, start building