Pricing
Cloud provider pricing for Alien Postgres resources.
Alien provisions Postgres in your customer's cloud. The customer pays the cloud provider for the database, and Alien charges a small management fee. See Pricing for Alien's current rates.
Prices shown for US East regions and are indicative. Last verified: June 2026.
Cost Components
A Postgres bill has the same components on every cloud:
| Component | What it is |
|---|---|
| Compute | The instance (or, on AWS, ACU-seconds). |
| Storage | Allocated GB per month. |
| Backups | Retained backup storage (7-day retention). |
| HA multiplier | highAvailability() roughly doubles compute + storage (a standby that serves no reads). |
Per Cloud
AWS — Aurora Serverless v2. Billed per ACU-hour with scale-to-zero: while idle, compute bills nothing and you pay storage only (~$0.10/GB-month). A 0.5-ACU floor is ~$44/month if it never idles; with scale-to-zero the effective cost tracks how much your stack actually idles. The trade-off is a ~15 s resume after idle (see Behavior).
GCP — Cloud SQL (Enterprise). Alien defaults to a 1 vCPU / 3.75 GB Enterprise tier (db-custom-1-3840); cpu/memory size it up to a larger db-custom tier. There is no shared-core or scale-to-zero option, so it bills continuously (around $50/month for compute at the default tier, before storage). highAvailability() maps to a regional configuration.
Azure — Flexible Server. Burstable B1ms starts around $13/month; minimum storage is 32 GiB (smaller requests round up). highAvailability() maps to zone-redundant HA at roughly 2× cost.
Local
No cloud charges — Postgres runs as a local process on your machine.
Free Tiers
- AWS: Aurora Serverless v2 is not covered by the RDS free tier.
- GCP: Cloud SQL has no always-free tier.
- Azure: Flexible Server offers a 12-month free tier (a B1ms instance, 750 hours/month, plus 32 GiB storage) for new accounts.