Is Redis free? What it actually costs in 2026
Yes, there is a free tier — with limits.
The software is free to run. Redis Cloud starts around $5/month for a small instance and scales into four figures for production clusters with replication and persistence; AWS ElastiCache, Azure Cache and Google Memorystore price similarly per node-hour. Redis Enterprise is quoted. The bill is for memory and availability, and memory is the expensive kind of storage. Figures checked 2026-08-05.
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
Pricing is verified against the vendor's published figures and dated above. Vendors change prices — confirm current numbers with Redis Ltd before you commit. More in-memory data stores & caching decisions on Macrostack.