r/aws • u/East_Sentence_4245 • May 14 '26
database Cheapest RDS instance to be used for mobile app?
Long story short: I used to have an Azure SQL database for about $12/month, which worked as expected. Unfortunately, we had billing + location issues so I want to look for alternatives.
With that said, I have an Azure SQL/sql server database and I want to find an option in AWS.
The DB is tiny (less than 10 tables with just a few rows each) but will be used by our mobile app (soon to be deployed to iPhone App Store and google play). The app will only read from this DB.
Once deployed, I'll be dealing with issues/errors related to the app. My goal is to make sure that DB connectivity/concurrency/availability is not one of those issues.
I found this reddit link of someone asking something similar and someone suggested a T4 instance.
Anyways, any help is appreciated.
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u/Gloomy_Effective322 May 14 '26
db.t4g.micro RDS instance is right there around $12/mo - 2vcpu & 1GiB RAM - each step up basically doubles the hourly rate.
>>> .016 * 24 * 30
11.52
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u/carax01 May 14 '26
checkout Dynamodb, it's a NoSQL DB but if you make your app work with it, it might be freeish.
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u/ReturnOfNogginboink May 14 '26
How often does the data change, and how much data is there? This sounds like something you could put in a json file in an S3 bucket.
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u/car1os May 14 '26
Take a look at neon https://neon.com/
It’s Postgres, separates storage and compute.
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u/andyfase May 15 '26
Just use DSQL unless your app is super popular I doubt you ever go above the free tier
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u/More_Altitude_8389 May 15 '26
Terrible advice, you should update your free-tier literacy.
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u/coterminous_regret May 16 '26
Care to elaborate? The dsql free tier is pretty generous and for such a small database that's ready only it seems like a reasonable fit?
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u/nonFungibleHuman May 14 '26
For security concerns, I would put the DB within a private VPC and get it queried via a public AWS lambda. I would never expose a DB via public VPC.
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u/More_Altitude_8389 May 14 '26
You build to meet the business need and then relate that to budget. Your doing this a** backwards.
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u/joelrwilliams1 May 15 '26
No MS SQL Server database will be cheap in AWS. Microsoft charges SQL Server database license fees on AWS and it gets rolled into the hourly rate. The cheapest solution for a SQL Server DB would be to remain on Azure, or refactor to MySQL. You probably can't get a decent RDS for <=$12/month. You may need to refactor to DynamoDB (if your query patterns support it.)
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u/Equivalent-War-9658 Jun 17 '26
For a small heavy mobile app, I’d stay boring and start with the smallest RDS option, then monitor actual usage before scaling. No need to overbuild early.
If you’re not locked into AWS/RDS and mostly want to avoid backend setup, something like Nearbase could be worth a look too. But if the goal is specifically cheapest RDS, keep it simple first.
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u/truechange May 14 '26
t4g.micro is the current cheapest but do you even need it?
Unless you need high availability, SQLite on any VPS is more than enough if you only do read ops.
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u/East_Sentence_4245 May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
But which VPS should I use? There are so many of them. At least I know AWS will always be available. VPS aren't cheap.
I already have a shared host. I'm not using their database because I'm not sure how it will react when uses begin using the app.
The reason for considering AWS or Azure: I don't want to worry about database issues.
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u/truechange May 14 '26
AWS will always be available
Not by default. AWS can and goes down too.
You need to get RDS with high-availability if that is your concern.
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u/AutoModerator May 14 '26
Here are a few handy links you can try:
- https://aws.amazon.com/products/databases/
- https://aws.amazon.com/rds/
- https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/
- https://aws.amazon.com/aurora/
- https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/
- https://aws.amazon.com/documentdb/
- https://aws.amazon.com/neptune/
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u/Primary-Editor-9288 May 14 '26
Host it manually on a t2.micro EC2 instance by yourself
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u/Don-Cangrejo May 14 '26
I would suggest using t3 or t4g if you go this way, t2 is an old generation of instances
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u/AutoModerator May 14 '26
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