CloudAMQP's free RabbitMQ plan caps connections at twenty

The workload

Hosting RabbitMQ instead of running it directly means checking a managed vendor's own connection and queue ceilings before wiring an application to it. CloudAMQP's plans page, retrieved 16 September 2026, states those ceilings for its free tier by name; the workload is reading them before, not after, hitting a connection refusal in production.

What the documents show

CloudAMQP's plans page states, verified, that its free 'Little Lemur' plan is limited to a maximum of 100 queues, a maximum of 10,000 queued messages, a 20-connection limit, a 1 million message-per-month quota, a 28-day maximum idle-queue time, and runs on a shared RabbitMQ broker, all at $0. The next paid tier, 'Tough Tiger,' verified, raises those ceilings to 1,000 queues, 100,000 queued messages, 100 connections, and 10 million messages per month, for $19 per month, still on a shared broker. Both are described as multi-tenant plans for development or small hobby projects, distinct from CloudAMQP's dedicated plans, which start at $50 per month for a single node with a benchmarked 500 messages-per-second throughput and 1,500 connections. CloudAMQP's own FAQ documentation adds, verified, that moving from a shared plan to a dedicated one is not a simple in-place upgrade for RabbitMQ brokers specifically: the FAQ states that migrating 'from a shared to a dedicated plan is not supported directly via Edit' for RabbitMQ, and recommends queue federation instead, whereas its newer LavinMQ broker option supports a direct migration through the console.

The operating cost

The free tier costs $0 per month but is capped at the 20-connection, 1-million-message ceiling stated above, verified. Moving to Tough Tiger costs a flat $19 per month for the stated 100-connection, 10-million-message ceiling, verified. Moving beyond that to a dedicated single node costs $50 per month, verified, at which point throughput is described as benchmarked rather than shared and best-effort. CloudAMQP's pages state these three price points directly; no further calculation is needed to compare them, since all three are flat monthly, or free, rates rather than usage-metered.

The stop condition

The plans page states hard stop conditions for the free tier: 20 simultaneous connections and 10,000 queued messages on Little Lemur, or 100,000 once on Tough Tiger — a queue that backs up past that ceiling has nowhere to put new messages under the stated limits. The FAQ's migration guidance implies a second, less obvious stop condition: because RabbitMQ brokers cannot move from shared to dedicated with a simple in-place edit, the point to plan a queue-federation migration is before the connection or queue ceiling is hit, not after, since the migration itself takes deliberate setup rather than a button click.

• Does current peak connection count sit comfortably under 20, or is it already approaching the free tier's ceiling?
• If migrating off the shared plan becomes necessary, has the queue-federation path been tested in advance?
• Would the jump from $19 to $50 per month be justified by the workload's actual throughput today?

This entry documents CloudAMQP's hosting terms only; the separate question of what licence governs the RabbitMQ server software itself is not addressed here.