Plans & Pricing

You pay an hourly rate per service. That rate covers the managed data service itself, the underlying cloud infrastructure, and everything Aiven does to keep it running: provisioning, monitoring, local backups, version upgrades, security patching, and 24/7 reliability operations.

There are no separate line items for high availability, or routine maintenance. What you see on the plan card is what you pay.

Your bill changes only when you change something: choose a larger plan, add extra storage, spin up additional services, upgrade your support tier, or enable BYOC. Services are billed by the hour and invoiced monthly, so you only pay for what you actually run.

Aiven pricing is designed to make production data infrastructure performant and predictable. Instead of paying separately for infrastructure and managing operations yourself, you choose the service, cloud/region, and plan size that fits your workload, and Aiven manages the operational work behind that service.

We recognize that buyers are often in a different stage of adoption or maturity. For example, a developer experimenting with PostgreSQL does not need the same availability, backup retention, capacity, and support as a bank running Kafka for critical production workloads.

General plan guidance:

Many organizations focus only on the infrastructure bill and miss the costs associated with engineering labor, manual maintenance, and incident response. While a hyperscaler’s raw compute might appear cheaper on a list price, they typically meter networking, backups, data writes and reads, and high availability separately, which can lead to unpredictable monthly expenses and "bill shock."

Cloud providers charge separately for:

• High availability and multi-AZ replication
• Automated backups and storage retention
• Data transfer and egress between services or regions
• Monitoring and alerting tools
• The engineering time to configure, maintain, and upgrade everything

When you add those costs up, plus the ongoing cost of your team managing it, the gap closes quickly, and often inverts.

Aiven bundles the software, infrastructure, and the operational expertise into a single, predictable hourly rate. High availability, security hardening, and version upgrades are standard — not add-ons. Your engineers focus on building products and data pipelines, not on running infrastructure or maintaining open source software.

Remember: the real comparison isn't list price vs. list price line item. It's total cost of ownership: what you pay Aiven vs. what you pay in cloud bills + engineering time + incident response.

Yes. Free plans are available for PostgreSQL®, MySQL, OpenSearch, Kafka, and Valkey™. They are ideal for learning, prototypes, demos, and early evaluation before moving to a paid plan. Free plans include capped resources and access to the Aiven platform experience, including management through the Console, CLI, API, Terraform Provider, plus metrics and logs.

Free plans do not have any time limitations. However, Aiven reserves the right to shut down services if we believe they violate the acceptable use policy or are unused for an extended period of time. For more details, check out our documentation.

If you need more memory or access to more advanced features, try a free 30-day trial.

Yes, in fact it’s very common for Aiven customers to provision multiple services to develop real-time application platforms using Kafka, Postgres, and Valkey or build an operational analytics stack with Kafka, OpenSearch, and Clickhouse.

To estimate cost, price each service independently for your chosen cloud, region, and plan — then add them together. There are no bundle fees, no cross-service licensing, and no separate contracts per service.

Common patterns include:

See our case studies page to learn what you can build with Aiven, and contact sales to ask about Aiven solutions.

Yes to all of the above.

Cloud marketplace: Purchase Aiven through AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure marketplaces. Spend counts toward your existing cloud commitments and goes through your current billing relationship — no separate procurement process.

Annual commitments and prepaid discounts: Available for eligible customers. Committing to usage upfront typically unlocks better pricing than pay-as-you-go.

BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud): Aiven operates your services inside your own cloud account. You pay Aiven's service fee; your cloud provider bills you separately for the underlying infrastructure. BYOC is useful for customers with large cloud committed spend, specific compliance requirements, private networking needs, or data locality rules, but it makes total cost more sensitive to your cloud provider's pricing.

For annual commitments, prepaid options, custom offers, or BYOC pricing, contact Aiven Sales.

Running open source databases and streaming services yourself looks free until you price in everything it actually requires.

The software license is free. The operational burden is not.

When you self-manage on cloud infrastructure, you're paying for:

Studies consistently put the fully-loaded engineering cost of self-managing a production database or streaming cluster at $150,000–$300,000+ per year per service, when you factor in salary, on-call, and incident time.

Aiven replaces all of that operational work with a single hourly rate. Your engineers stop being infrastructure operators and start being builders again.

Service-specific vendors go deep on one technology. Aiven goes broad across the full data stack, and prices it more transparently.

The key differences:

Feature gating. Service-specific vendors often tier their pricing by feature access: connectors, audit logs, role-based access, or advanced security are locked to higher tiers. On Aiven, operational features like monitoring, backups, and access controls are standard across plans, not premium add-ons.

Consumption-based compounding. Vendors often charge by ingest volume, partition count, or connector usage, costs that are hard to predict and compound as your usage grows. Aiven's plan-based pricing makes your bill reflect the size of your workload, not the granularity of how you use the service.

Single-service lock-in. If you use Confluent for Kafka, you still need a separate contract for your database, your search layer, and your caching layer, each with its own support line, pricing model, and renewal cycle. Aiven gives you Kafka, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, ClickHouse, Valkey, and more under one platform, one contract, and one invoice.

Multi-cloud and portability. Most service-specific vendors are tied to one or two clouds. Aiven runs on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and others, in 100+ regions — with the same operational experience everywhere.