If you have been following me you know I recently started playing with AWS Elasticache’s Serverless Clusters. I launched one last month which currently holds 23.6KB of data. KB, not GB, not even MB. So I was surprised to see a $90 a month charge for elasticache data storage when I logged in today.

According to the official AWS Elasticache Pricing Page it should only be $0.125 / GB-hour. So that would be $0.00000295 per hour or roughly $0.002124 per month. That is not the case. I am getting ripped off somehow.

Upon revisiting the billing page I can now see this little blurb “Each ElastiCache Serverless cache is metered for a minimum of 1 GB of data stored” so it is partially on me, but I am still blown away they injected that 1GB min in there making the service basically pointless. You might as well go with a dedicated instance.

I am a pretty steadfast fan of AWS but stuff like this makes them a lot less appetizing to use. $90 a month won’t break the bank for me but it is now in my back log to rip that down and find another solution. Too bad, I thought the serverless Redis was a pretty innovative service but not if it's priced to gouge your hard earned money.