What is Upstash used for?

Upstash offers serverless Redis, Kafka and vector database services billed per request, suited to developers building on serverless and edge platforms. It is a good fit for caching for serverless web apps, rate limiting and session storage at the edge, and vector search for AI features.

Yes. Upstash has a free plan, and paid plans start at $10 per month. A free trial is also available.

Is Upstash open source?

No. Upstash is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Upstash include Redis, DiceDB and Dragonfly.

What are some alternatives to Upstash?

Upstash competes with Amazon DynamoDB, PlanetScale and MongoDB Atlas. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Upstash alternatives.

Upstash: features, pricing and alternatives

About Upstash

Upstash is a hosted data service that provides Redis, Kafka and a vector database without servers for you to run or size. Instead of paying for an always-on instance, you are billed for the requests your application actually makes, which fits apps with spiky or low traffic.

Its Redis offering can be reached over a REST interface as well as the standard protocol, which makes it usable from serverless functions and edge runtimes where long-lived connections are awkward. The same managed approach extends to Kafka for event streaming and to a vector store for search and AI workloads. Upstash is a commercial cloud service rather than something you install yourself.

Key features

Serverless Redis with per-request billing
Managed Kafka for event streaming
Vector database for similarity search
REST access suited to edge and serverless functions
No servers to provision or size

Good fit for

→Caching for serverless web apps
→Rate limiting and session storage at the edge
→Vector search for AI features

Tags: redis; kafka; vector-database; serverless; edge; caching; managed-database

Upstash: questions and answers

What is Upstash used for?: Upstash offers serverless Redis, Kafka and vector database services billed per request, suited to developers building on serverless and edge platforms. It is a good fit for caching for serverless web apps, rate limiting and session storage at the edge, and vector search for AI features.
Is Upstash free?: Yes. Upstash has a free plan, and paid plans start at $10 per month. A free trial is also available.
Is Upstash open source?: No. Upstash is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Upstash include Redis, DiceDB and Dragonfly.
What are some alternatives to Upstash?: Upstash competes with Amazon DynamoDB, PlanetScale and MongoDB Atlas. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Upstash alternatives.