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Postgres pricing

Is Amazon RDS cheaper than Cloud SQL?

Short answer: it depends on your workload. Amazon RDS bills around the clock; Cloud SQL bills around the clock. The two cases below flip the answer.

Bursty or idle workload
1 CU, ~4 h/day, scale-to-zero, 10 GB
Amazon RDS$47.87
Cloud SQL$52.29
Amazon RDS is cheaper here
Steady, always-on workload
2 CU, 24/7, 50 GB
Amazon RDS$129
Cloud SQL$110
Cloud SQL is cheaper here

Amazon RDS: Managed Postgres on AWS, billed around the clock per instance. It bills per instance-hour, 24/7, no scale-to-zero.

Cloud SQL: Managed Postgres on Google Cloud, priced per vCPU and RAM. It bills per vCPU-hour + per GB-RAM-hour, 24/7.

So Amazon RDS is cheaper than Cloud SQL for bursty or idle databases, and more expensive for the other. Your real answer depends on your compute size, how many hours a day the database is active, and your storage.

Run your exact numbers

Move the sliders for your workload and see Amazon RDS, Cloud SQL, and the others side by side.

Open the comparator
Is Amazon RDS cheaper than Cloud SQL?

It depends on your workload. For a bursty or idle database, Amazon RDS is usually cheaper (about $47.87 vs $52.29 in our reference case). For a steady, always-on database, Cloud SQL comes out ahead. Run your own numbers in the comparator.

What decides which is cheaper?

Mostly whether your database can idle. Amazon RDS bills around the clock; Cloud SQL bills around the clock. Compute size and storage matter too.

Whichever you pick, FluentDB is the Mac client for it.

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See also: Is Cloud SQL cheaper than Amazon RDS? · Prices last verified 2026-08-01.