Redis free tiers compared: what each one runs out of

Comparing free Redis tiers by how much they give you is the wrong axis. They all give you enough for a side project. What separates them is the one resource each vendor decided to make scarce, because that is the thing that will end your free tier, and every vendor picked a different one.

Upstash meters commands. Redis Cloud meters memory, and then quietly meters connections and throughput underneath it. Render gives you an instance that does not persist anything. Aiven gives you a real VM and powers it off when you stop using it. We put idle databases to sleep and wake them on the next connection. Five different answers to the same cost problem, and which one is right for you depends entirely on the shape of your workload.

I run Layerbase, so the bias is on the table. I have tried to make the competitor rows accurate enough that you could use this table to argue against me.

Contents

• The table
• Upstash: the counter is the product
• Redis Cloud: 30 MB is not the tight part
• Aiven: a real VM that powers off
• Render and Railway: read the durability line
• Layerbase: idle time is the currency
• Picking by workload shape

The table

All figures below are from each vendor's own pricing page or docs, checked on 11 August 2026, and linked in the sections that follow. Free tiers move: Redis Cloud restructured Essentials in December 2025, Vercel stopped offering first-party KV entirely, and any of these numbers can change the week after this publishes. Treat the table as a snapshot and click through before you commit.

Upstash: the counter is the product

Upstash free is $0 for one database with 256 MB of data, 500,000 commands a month, and 10 GB of bandwidth, with no credit card (pricing). Past the free allowance, pay as you go is $0.20 per 100,000 commands, or you can move to a fixed plan starting at $10/month for 250 MB.

500,000 commands a month sounds like a lot until you divide it: about 16,000 a day, or 11 a minute sustained. A session store for a low-traffic app fits comfortably. A rate limiter fits until traffic arrives. A cache with a read-through pattern on a page that gets any real traffic does not, because a cache is supposed to be hit constantly. That is the honest tension in a per-command free tier: the workloads Redis is best at are the ones that burn the allowance fastest.

The upside is that Upstash's model is genuinely serverless. At zero traffic you pay zero and there is nothing to turn off. If your project is spiky and mostly asleep, the counter is a fair deal, and the REST API means it works from runtimes that cannot open a TCP socket.

One number I could not verify: Upstash does not publish a concurrent-connection limit for the free plan. Their troubleshooting page describes how connections get evicted when you exceed the limit but never states the number for any plan. If you are planning around connection count, ask them rather than trusting a comparison post, including this one.

Redis Cloud: 30 MB is not the tight part

Everyone quotes the 30 MB. It is the least interesting constraint on the plan.

Redis Cloud's free Essentials database (plan details updated December 2025) is 30 MB, and alongside it: 30 concurrent connections, 100 operations per second maximum throughput, 5 GB of monthly network bandwidth, and one CIDR allow rule. The throughput footnote is worth reading closely, because it assumes a 1 KiB request size and notes the real ceiling is whatever MB/s you actually reach.

30 connections is the number that will find you first. A single serverless deployment without pooling can open that many during one traffic spike. 100 ops/sec is a cache that cannot be a cache. And the plan carries no high availability and no backups; Redis's own docs say those start on the paid plans at 250 MB.

Then there is the part almost no comparison post mentions, because it lives in the legal text rather than the product docs. The Redis Cloud Agreement (last updated 15 May 2026) states that "Redis may delete inactive Evaluation Services instances and associated Customer Data after 14 days of inactivity (as determined by the absence of account activity)." The docs never repeat this. If you are treating a free Redis Cloud database as somewhere to leave a staging keyspace for a month, read that sentence twice.

You can also only hold one free database per account. To make a second, you delete or upgrade the first.

Aiven: a real VM that powers off

Aiven is the most honest free tier on this list and it gets undersold because it is not marketed as a Redis product anymore. Aiven renamed their Redis offering to Valkey after the license change, and the free plan survived the rename: their pricing page says free plans are available for PostgreSQL, MySQL, OpenSearch, Kafka, and Valkey.

Free Valkey is 1 CPU and 1 GB of RAM on a dedicated VM, backups for disaster recovery, no credit card, and no time limit. One free service per service type per account. The catch is stated plainly in their docs: free services with no continuing activity get powered off, with a notification sent first. Powered off, not deleted, and you can turn it back on.

What Aiven does not publish anywhere I could find is the storage size for free Valkey specifically. The free-tier page lists storage for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and OpenSearch, and has no Valkey row. Do not assume it matches the Postgres number; ask before you plan around it.

Render and Railway: read the durability line

Render's free Key Value instance is real and it is free, and the docs are refreshingly direct about what you are getting: "Data persistence is not available for free Key Value instances," and "Render might restart a Free Render Key Value instance at any time (thereby deleting its data)" (Key Value docs).

That is a legitimate product for a pure cache where a cold start is a miss and nothing more. It is disqualifying for a session store, a job queue, or a rate limiter with any memory. One free instance per workspace. Worth separating from the other Render policy people conflate with it: the 30-day expiry applies to free Postgres, not to Key Value.

Railway does not really belong in a free-tier comparison, but it comes up constantly, so: their pricing has a free plan carrying $1 of monthly usage credits, plus a trial of $5 in credits for 30 days. There is no free Redis allowance. A Redis service just consumes the general credit, and $1 does not run one for a month.

Layerbase: idle time is the currency

Our free tier is $0/mo with no card and no expiry date. It covers 2 databases, 5 GB of storage, and up to 20 concurrent connections, and Redis is one of the engines you can create on it.

• 8 engines on Free, so a Redis or Valkey cache and a Postgres alongside it both fit inside the same free account.
• Persistence is on. Every Redis database snapshots to disk, and a hibernating database is shut down with a final save, so a sleep and wake cycle does not cost you keys.
• 1 manual backup slot, triggered by you. Scheduled daily snapshots start on the paid plans.
• TLS and IP allowlists included. Security is not the upgrade lever.

The scarce resource here is idle time, and I would rather spell out the whole ladder than let you find it later.

A free Redis database hibernates after 60 minutes with no connections; paid plans wait 6 hours. Hibernation keeps the hostname, the port, and the data volume, so the next connection wakes it in roughly 1 to 5 seconds and your command then runs normally. There is no button to press. The one precondition is that your client sends the TLS SNI hostname, which every Redis client does once you set the TLS servername, and Redis is an engine where we have verified the wake path end to end rather than assuming it.

Leave a free database hibernating for 14 days and it is archived: the address is released, and getting it back takes an explicit Restore that runs roughly 10 to 30 seconds. Data and backups are kept. A database you never connected to at all archives after 7 days, because there is nothing to keep warm for. After 90 continuous days archived, the live resources are reclaimed and the most recent backup is kept and still restorable in one click. Paid databases are never auto-archived.

That is four numbers instead of one, and the reason I list all four is that "free tier" claims usually hide exactly this ladder. The trade is real: you get 5 GB instead of 30 MB, and no command meter at all, in exchange for a first connection after an idle hour that takes a few seconds, and a restore step if you walk away for two weeks. If your database has to answer in single-digit milliseconds at 3am on a Sunday with no traffic before it, a free tier is the wrong product on every platform here, and on ours the fix is a paid plan that pins it always-on. Solo is $5/mo and Pro is $15/mo.

We wrote up why this architecture is what makes a free tier durable in The Free Tier That Stays, and the wider taxonomy of sleeping, pausing, and expiring free tiers in Every free database tier that sleeps, pauses, or expires.

Picking by workload shape

Ignore the headline numbers and match the ceiling to your traffic:

• Spiky and mostly idle, called from the edge. Upstash. A command counter is the right meter for a workload that genuinely does almost nothing most of the month, and the REST client works where TCP does not.
• Learning Redis, or a demo you will delete. Redis Cloud's 30 MB is fine, and it is the closest thing to reference Redis with the Stack modules attached. Do not leave anything you care about in it for two weeks.
• A pure cache where a miss is free. Render's Key Value instance, with clear eyes about the restart behavior.
• A single always-warm instance and you like dedicated VMs. Aiven, as long as your working set fits 1 GB of RAM and you accept the power-off on inactivity.
• A cache or session store that stays put, gets used in bursts, and should not have a meter attached. Managed Redis on Layerbase, or Valkey if you would rather not depend on the Redis license. Both are wire-compatible with the client you already use, and the difference between them is licensing, not behavior; Redis vs Valkey has that comparison in full.

If you are coming from a metered plan and want your keys moved rather than re-created, the copy is a non-blocking scan that preserves every type and TTL: see migrating from Upstash.

Create a free Redis database. No card, no command counter, and no expiry date on the plan. It will sleep when you stop talking to it, and it will be there when you come back.