Is Redis free? What it actually costs in 2026
Redis itself is free to run on your own hardware. Redis Cloud's free tier is 30 MB — enough for a cache, not for a database.
Two different answers. The software is free to download and run. Redis Cloud's Free plan is $0 forever but gives you 30 MB on shared infrastructure with a best-effort SLA.
Redis 8 added AGPLv3, making Redis Open Source OSI-compliant again after the 2024 move to RSALv2 and SSPL.
The 2024 licence change is what created Valkey, and a lot of teams migrated on the strength of it. If you left for licensing reasons rather than technical ones, the reason you left has partly been reversed — but RSALv2's managed-service restriction still applies unless you choose AGPLv3.
What the free tier actually includes
- 30 MB of RAM, one database, shared deployment
- Best-effort SLA — no uptime guarantee
- Community support only
- Active-passive global distribution only
Where the wall is
Memory. 30 MB holds a session cache for a small app and nothing else, and Redis prices on RAM because RAM is the expensive kind of storage. The next step up is Essentials at about $5 a month for 250 MB, which is a real jump in capability for very little money — the free tier is a demo, not a home.
After that: Essentials from $0.007 an hour, about $5 a month, for 250 MB to 100 GB with SAML SSO, RBAC and encryption at rest and in transit, up to 99.99% uptime. Pro starts at $0.014 an hour with a $200 monthly minimum and adds dedicated deployment, active-active multi-region and up to 99.999% uptime.
Can you self-host Redis? Yes
Yes, and this is where Redis's own licence matters. From Redis 8 you choose between RSALv2, SSPLv1 and AGPLv3. AGPLv3 is OSI-approved open source; RSALv2 is not — Redis says so plainly — and it forbids offering the software to others as a managed service. Running Redis for your own application is free under all three; reselling it as a service is what the licences are written to stop, which is why the Valkey fork exists.
What it actually takes to run one yourself
Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.
Self-hosting Valkey
Self-hosting DragonflyDB
Self-hosting Memcached
When paying is still the right call
Stay if you are already running it and it works — Redis 8 is AGPL, which is open source by any definition, and there is no licence emergency to respond to. Stay if you depend on the proprietary modules, because the forks do not reproduce them and rebuilding search or JSON support is a project. Stay for the ecosystem: two decades of client libraries, tutorials and operational knowledge, which is worth more than a small performance delta. And stay if you buy Redis Enterprise support, where the relationship is the product.
What you are locked into
Very low, and it is the reason this category moved so fast. The Redis wire protocol is the interface, and Valkey, DragonflyDB, KeyDB and Garnet all implement it — so your client library, your commands and your code stay as they are, and switching is a change of hostname. That portability is exactly why the fork succeeded where forks usually fail. What does not port is anything using Redis Ltd's proprietary modules: RedisJSON, RediSearch, RedisTimeSeries. Teams using plain Redis move in an afternoon; teams built on the modules are rewriting.
If you would rather not pay: Valkey
Valkey
The Linux Foundation fork — same Redis, governance that cannot be revoked.
Free and open source. Managed offerings from AWS, Google and others.
See all 5 Redis alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Read from Redis Ltd's own pricing and documentation on 2026-09-12 — 39 days ago. Vendors change prices without notice; confirm before you commit.