Upstash is a serverless Redis, vector, and messaging platform with pay-per-request pricing built for serverless and edge applications. Free tier available.
Upstash is a serverless data platform that provides Redis-compatible caching, a vector database for AI applications, message queuing through its QStash product, workflow orchestration, and search, all designed around pay-per-request pricing rather than always-on servers.
The company was founded in 2020 by Enes Akar, Mehmet Dogan, and Bilal Yasar, and is headquartered in San Jose, California. CEO Enes Akar previously worked on distributed systems at Confluent and Hazelcast before starting Upstash, and the company has raised roughly 11.9 million dollars from investors including Andreessen Horowitz.
Upstash's core technical differentiator is exposing its databases over HTTP and REST in addition to standard Redis TCP protocols, which makes it compatible with serverless and edge runtimes such as Vercel Edge Functions and Cloudflare Workers where persistent TCP connections are impractical.
Upstash Redis data is replicated globally across eight or more regions to keep read latency low for geographically distributed applications, and multiple databases can be deployed with multi-region replication for high availability.
Because billing is pay-per-request, idle databases cost nothing, which is a significant difference from traditional managed Redis where a provisioned instance is billed continuously whether or not it is used. Upstash guarantees price caps so usage-based costs remain predictable at scale.
Beyond Redis, Upstash Vector provides a managed vector database for embeddings and semantic search used in AI and retrieval-augmented generation applications, and QStash provides a serverless message queue and scheduler for background jobs and webhooks.
Upstash offers a free tier with 256 MB of storage, 10 GB of monthly bandwidth, and 500,000 commands per month across one database. The Pay as You Go tier charges about 0.20 dollars per 100,000 commands and 0.25 dollars per GB of storage, with the first gigabyte of storage free and bandwidth free up to 200 GB per month.
For predictable costs, fixed-price plans start at 10 dollars a month for 250 MB of storage with unlimited commands (subject to a throughput ceiling), scaling up to 1,500 dollars a month for 500 GB. A Prod Pack add-on for 200 dollars a month per database adds an uptime SLA, encryption at rest, SOC 2 compliance, and multi-zone high availability, while Enterprise plans offer custom pricing with unlimited databases and bandwidth plus HIPAA compliance.
It is used as a serverless Redis, vector database, and messaging platform, commonly for caching, session storage, rate limiting, and AI application infrastructure.
Yes, there is a free tier with 256 MB of storage and 500,000 commands per month; paid pay-as-you-go and fixed plans are available for larger workloads.
It was founded in 2020 by Enes Akar, Mehmet Dogan, and Bilal Yasar.
HTTP access lets Upstash databases work reliably in serverless and edge runtimes like Vercel Edge Functions and Cloudflare Workers, where persistent TCP connections are impractical.
It uses pay-per-request pricing based on commands, storage, and bandwidth, plus optional fixed-price and Enterprise plans for predictable costs.
Yes, through Upstash Vector, a separate managed vector database product for embeddings and semantic search.
Upstash is generally better suited to serverless and edge workloads due to its HTTP API and zero idle cost, while Redis Cloud tends to offer higher sustained throughput and native Redis modules.
Upstash is headquartered in San Jose, California.