
Ask HN: What should I expect as typical Amazon Redshift charges? - krmmalik
Just finished on a two month trial with Amazon Redshift but still none the wiser. Im on the most basic cluster package but i dont know how to estimate what our monthly charges are likely to be. Can someone provide some guidance?
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MichaelBurge
You can't really shut down and restart a Redshift cluster on-demand, since
they take hours to start up on a larger dataset. So you should take the
standard pricing and assume it's running 24/7(maybe you can shut it down on
weekends or on holidays).

Last I looked, that was something like $7500/year on-demand for a single 2TB
node. Multiply that by the number of nodes you need to store your data.
Probably you'll want to prepurchase a year to get the better pricing and tax
benefits; I think that brings it down to $5000/year.

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bsg75
Hours to start up? On what size dataset does that start to become the case?

Been experimenting with BigQuery, and interested in how pricing compares:
Usage vs instance based.

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MichaelBurge
The one I had in mind was about 50TB. A year ago, that would take up to 17
hours from startup to be 'fully available'(I think it prioritizes which tables
to load based on how you query them). I haven't worked with it since; Amazon
may have improved the startup times.

We were thinking about trying BigQuery at one point since the pricing matched
our usage better, but Redshift was good enough. The concern there was that
Redshift was similar enough to Postgres we could use our existing database
libraries, while BigQuery was some entirely custom protocol that didn't have a
Perl SDK.

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marrone12
The pricing is pretty self explanatory:
[https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/pricing/)

Now, if you're asking what kind of cluster you'd need for optimal usage, that
is a different question.

