How Much Does Amazon Redshift Cost in 2026?

Redshift's competitive advantage is AWS ecosystem integration. For organizations committed to AWS with significant S3 data, Lambda, Kinesis, or QuickSight usage, Redshift's native integration reduces architecture complexity versus Snowflake/Databricks on AWS. Zero data egress cost within AWS region is material when competitors charge for cross-account or cross-service data movement. Provisioned clusters at $0.543/hour (US East N. Virginia baseline; other regions 10-30% higher) are sized for consistent workloads. RA3 nodes are recommended current generation — compute and storage bill independently (storage $0.024/GB-month), enabling scaling compute while keeping data constant. Dense Compute (DC) and Dense Storage (DS) are previous-generation at lower hourly rates but with coupled compute-storage (less flexible). Reserved Instance discounts up to 45% (3-year commit) or 24% (1-year) for predictable workloads. Redshift Serverless starting at $1.50/hour per RPU (Redshift Processing Unit) is the serverless option — 4-1024 RPUs base capacity, automatic scaling, per-second billing with 60-second minimum. Serverless Reservations offer up to 24% (1-year) or 45% (3-year) discount. Serverless free trial: $300 credit valid for 90 days (no credit card needed for trial). Provisioned free trial: 2 months. Spectrum enables querying S3 data lake data without loading into Redshift — $5/TB scanned. Concurrency Scaling auto-adds temporary clusters during high-load periods — 1 free hour daily per cluster + per-second overage for additional. Redshift ML trains models via Amazon SageMaker integration — free tier 2 CREATE MODEL requests/month, additional training $20/million cells (first 10M). Where Redshift wins: native AWS ecosystem integration (S3, Lambda, Kinesis, QuickSight) reduces cross-service egress costs, RA3 nodes separate compute and storage for flexible scaling, Spectrum enables querying S3 data lake without loading, Reserved Instances up to 45% discount for committed workloads, $300 credit 90-day Serverless trial is generous. Where it loses: AWS-only (not multi-cloud like Snowflake/Databricks), hourly provisioned billing less granular than Snowflake's per-second warehouse suspension, Serverless minimum 60-second billing unit can inflate cost for many tiny queries, node-type choice (DC/DS/RA3) adds cognitive overhead, Concurrency Scaling 1 hour/day free is tight for high-traffic clusters.