Redis Cloud Essentials starts at a $5-a-month floor

The workload

Running a managed Redis instance means choosing, at setup, what happens when the dataset outgrows the plan's memory ceiling. Redis's own data eviction documentation, retrieved 16 September 2026, is where that choice is made: a founder must pick one of eight named eviction policies before memory pressure forces the default on them.

What the documents show

Redis's own pricing page states, verified, that the free tier is capped at 30 MB in a shared cloud deployment with a single database and a best-effort SLA. The Essentials plan, verified, starts 'From $0.007/hour' with a stated total of '$5/month,' covers databases from 250 MB up to 100 GB of combined RAM and SSD in a shared deployment, and is described as carrying 'up to 99.99% uptime' with basic support only. The Pro plan, verified, starts 'From $0.014/hour' with a stated minimum of '$200/month,' moves to dedicated cloud deployment with unlimited RAM, and adds active-active multi-region replication. The eviction-policy documentation lists the available policies, verified: allkeys-lru, allkeys-lfu, allkeys-random, volatile-lru, volatile-lfu, volatile-random, volatile-ttl, and no eviction. It states, verified, that volatile-lru — removing least-recently-used keys that carry an expiry field — is the default, and that under no eviction, 'new values aren't saved when memory limit is reached.' For Active-Active databases specifically, the same documentation states eviction 'starts to evict keys when one of the Active-Active instances reaches 80% of its memory limit,' a different threshold from a standalone database.

The operating cost

Essentials costs a stated minimum of $5 per month regardless of how little memory is used, verified, and scales up to 100 GB before a founder must move to Pro's $200-per-month minimum, also verified. Redis's pricing page does not publish a linear per-GB rate inside Essentials; it directs founders to a separate pricing calculator for the exact figure at a given memory size, so no specific mid-tier dollar amount is stated here beyond the published floor and ceiling.

The stop condition

Redis's own documentation gives an operational stop condition rather than a cost one: under the default volatile-lru policy, only keys with an expiry set are eligible for eviction, so a dataset made entirely of keys without a TTL will behave like no eviction in practice even without selecting that policy by name — writes fail once memory is full and nothing evictable exists. The cost-side stop condition is editorial: once a workload's memory footprint approaches the top of Essentials' 100 GB range, the $200-per-month Pro floor is the next fixed cost step, not a gradual one.

• Do the keys this workload writes carry an expiry, or would the default eviction policy have nothing eligible to remove?
• Is 99.99% uptime, as stated for Essentials, sufficient for what this workload actually needs?
• At current memory growth, how many months remain before the 100 GB Essentials ceiling is reached?

Redis Cloud's managed pricing and eviction defaults are a vendor's own service terms; they say nothing about the separate question of which licence governs the open-source Redis software itself, a topic this entry does not cover.