Amazon OpenSearch Service
AWS-managed OpenSearch (open-source Elasticsearch fork). Provisioned domains bill per instance-hour plus EBS storage; Serverless bills per OCU-hour.
Teams already on AWS can run OpenSearch without metered searches, paying instead for instance-hours and EBS storage, from $26.04/month for the smallest single-node domain modelled here. Those figures use burstable t3 instances that are not recommended for production; a multi-AZ domain with replicas and dedicated masters costs about 2-4 times as much, though reserved instances cut 30-50%. Serverless is the alternative at $0.24 per OCU-hour, but classic collections need at least 2 OCUs, about $350/month.
- Headquarters
- 🇺🇸 United States
- Parent jurisdiction
- 🇺🇸 United States (parent: Amazon)
- EU self-serve plan
- Available; check eligible plans and regions
- GDPR DPA
- Yes
- Billing
- payg
- Free tier
- AWS free tier covers t2/t3.small.search hours for new accounts in their first 12 months (legacy free tier).
- Open source
- Yes · self-hostable
- Website
- aws.amazon.com
- Source last checked
- 2026-10-06
- Pricing evidence
- Modeled rates
Pricing
Published rates converted using workload assumptions. Read the notes. Single-node domain sized at 1 KB per record. Multi-zone availability, replicas and peak query load are not modeled. How to read these estimates.
| Plan | Base fee / month |
|---|---|
| 1x t3.small.search + 10 GB gp3 | $26.04 |
| 1x t3.medium.search + 20 GB gp3 | $52.08 |
| 1x m6g.large.search + 50 GB gp3 | $88.59 |
| 1x r6g.xlarge.search + 100 GB gp3 | $256.75 |
Allowances, plan limits & calculation details
Rates are shown at their recorded precision. A zero means no charge in this calculation; the vendor may charge for things we leave out. See the notes for usage assumptions and currency conversions.
1x t3.small.search + 10 GB gp3
- Base fee / month
- $26.04
- Included records (thousands)
- 0
- 1k additional records / month
- $0
- Included searches / month (thousands)
- 0
- 1k additional searches
- $0
- Modeled plan limits
- ≤ 100 records (thousands); ≤ 500 searches / month (thousands)
1x t3.medium.search + 20 GB gp3
- Base fee / month
- $52.08
- Included records (thousands)
- 0
- 1k additional records / month
- $0
- Included searches / month (thousands)
- 0
- 1k additional searches
- $0
- Modeled plan limits
- ≤ 500 records (thousands); ≤ 2,500 searches / month (thousands)
1x m6g.large.search + 50 GB gp3
- Base fee / month
- $88.59
- Included records (thousands)
- 0
- 1k additional records / month
- $0
- Included searches / month (thousands)
- 0
- 1k additional searches
- $0
- Modeled plan limits
- ≤ 3,000 records (thousands)
1x r6g.xlarge.search + 100 GB gp3
- Base fee / month
- $256.75
- Included records (thousands)
- 0
- 1k additional records / month
- $0
- Included searches / month (thousands)
- 0
- 1k additional searches
- $0
- Modeled plan limits
- ≤ 25,000 records (thousands)
Modelled as the smallest single-node provisioned domain in US East (on-demand, 730 h/month) that fits each bucket at ~1 KB per record: t3.small.search (2 GB RAM) $0.034/h, t3.medium.search (4 GB) $0.068/h, m6g.large.search (8 GB) $0.113/h, r6g.xlarge.search (32 GB) $0.335/h, plus gp3 EBS at $0.122/GB-month. Searches are not metered; t3 burstable instances are not recommended for production. A production multi-AZ domain with replicas and dedicated masters costs about 2-4 times this. Reserved instances cut the cost by 30-50%. OpenSearch Serverless costs $0.24 per OCU-hour plus $0.02/GB-month. Classic collections need at least 2 OCUs (about $350/month, or about $175 for dev/test), while NextGen collections scale to zero when idle. EU regions available.
Managed alternatives
At 1M records, 5M searches / month. Adjust usage and requirements.
Amazon OpenSearch Service: $1,063/yr estimated.
- Bonsai: $600/yr estimated · $463/yr bill differenceModeled ratesAssumes roughly 1 KB per record and checks document counts, not concurrency. Index overhead, peak traffic and availability can require a larger plan.
- Typesense Cloud: $864/yr estimated · $199/yr bill differenceModeled ratesSingle-node cluster with 1 KB records and modeled sizing. Production HA roughly triples cost; EU regions can cost more.
No cheaper managed estimate matches your filters. Adjust your usage or compare with your actual contract bill.
The price difference leaves out migration costs, operating costs and any features you’d need to replace.
Self-hosted options
Operating cost is not estimated. These options are not counted as savings against managed services.
Want a European-owned provider? See European alternatives to Amazon OpenSearch Service among european search providers.
Other search comparisons
- Algolia vs Typesense Cloud
- Algolia vs Meilisearch Cloud
- Typesense Cloud vs Meilisearch Cloud
- Algolia vs Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch)
Found a wrong rate or plan restriction? Report a correction with a current source.