Your RDS backup bill starts at zero, which is exactly why nobody watches it. AWS charges nothing for backup storage up to 100% of your total database storage in a Region, then bills $0.095 per GiB-month in us-east-1 (as of October 2026) for everything past that line.
That line moves faster than you'd expect, because manual snapshots never expire and backups of deleted instances keep billing at the same rate (the database is long gone, and the invoice line is still there).
So I compared eight RDS backup solutions on how each one bills, what pushes the number up, and what you get back on restore day, since a cheap backup you can only restore as a whole new instance carries its own cost.
The short version, if you're skimming:
Eon is the best RDS backup solution for teams that need long retention and row-level restores on a bill tied to what they protect: usage-based, billed per GB per month on protected storage, with no tier ladder and flexible spending commitments.
Amazon RDS automated backups stay the free base layer, with manual snapshots and cross-Region automated backups billed as plain storage. AWS Backup (central policy, Vault Lock, and cross-account copies) charges the same snapshot rate.
Commvault (Clumio) publishes per-GiB tiers, N2WS charges a flat monthly fee per instance, and Veeam licenses per protected instance. Druva (SaaS-delivered protection) and Rubrik (security-led recovery) quote through sales.
What RDS backup costs once retention grows
Native RDS keeps automated backups for 0 to 35 days, and the console default is 7 days. Anything older has to live as a manual snapshot or in AWS Backup, and that's where the free allowance starts running out.
The allowance looks generous at first. AWS's own example: a 500 GiB MySQL database plus a 200 GiB PostgreSQL database gets up to 700 GiB-month of backup storage at no additional charge.
Snapshot count is the next ceiling. AWS sets a default quota of 100 manual snapshots per Region, so a seven-year monthly schedule (84 snapshots per database) means a quota increase request by the second database, although snapshots that AWS Backup manages don't count toward that quota.
Aurora plays by slightly different rules. Backup storage up to 100% of the cluster size is free, snapshots inside the retention period cost nothing, and other backups run $0.021 per GB-month in us-east-1 as of October 2026.
Then come the copies. Cross-Region automated backups add data transfer plus snapshot storage in the destination Region, and exporting a snapshot to S3 costs $0.010 per GB of snapshot size in us-east-1 (as of October 2026), billed on the whole snapshot even when you want one table.
None of this is outrageous by itself. The bill grows because retention, copies, and exports stack up, and most teams only see the total (usually when finance forwards it with a question mark).
1. Eon: usage-based, billed per GB-month
The platform delivers cloud data protection and recovery from the team that built CloudEndure (later acquired by AWS). It connects through a single read-only role with no agents or appliances, and it covers RDS for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, SQL Server, and Oracle, plus Aurora.
It's built to sit next to the RDS automated backups you already run. When those are on, it discovers their restore points and can restore an RDS instance or Aurora cluster to any second.
It can also set PITR retention centrally across accounts and Regions while the recovery points stay in your own account. Past 35 days, its own snapshot policy takes over, and the recommended pairing is 7-day PITR plus long-retention snapshots.
Those snapshots sit in an immutable, logically air-gapped vault in a dedicated account away from production, with time-bound access so a stolen production key doesn't reach them.
How it bills: Usage-based, billed per GB per month on protected storage, with no tier ladder and flexible spending commitments. The company doesn't publish a list price, so expect a quote sized to the storage you protect.
The pricing page also rules out feature gates and scanning compute in your account. Its headline claim is up to 50% lower cost through global deduplication.
What drives the bill: Protected GB and how long you keep them, since retention runs as long as your policy needs. Ransomware detection (add-on) is its own package on top of storage, and database detection is still in early access.
That detection correlates multiple independent signals (such as row-count drops, schema changes, and ransom notes) into one weighted score.
Cost Explorer attributes spend from account to service to resource, which helps when someone asks why the line moved.
On restore day, you can bring back the instance, a database, a table, or only the rows a SQL query matches, so later good writes stay put. It also fingerprints every table, restores the backup to a temporary instance, and compares the fingerprints.
Tradeoff: No public price means you can't model it from a web page, so budget time for a sizing call. Its on-prem support is limited, so an estate that's still mostly on-prem should plan on a separate tool for the data center.
2. Amazon RDS automated backups: free up to database size
This is the base layer, and I'd leave it on no matter what else you buy. Automated backups give you point-in-time recovery for up to 35 days, with transaction logs uploaded to S3 every five minutes, and there's nothing to set up.
How it bills: Backup storage is free up to 100% of your total database storage in a Region. Past that, it's $0.095 per GiB-month in us-east-1 as of October 2026, the same rate for MySQL and PostgreSQL.
What drives the bill: Manual snapshots, mostly. They aren't subject to the retention period and don't expire, and retained automated backups and manual snapshots keep billing until you delete them, including backups of terminated instances.
Cross-Region automated backups copy snapshots and transaction logs to a second Region. You pay data transfer and destination snapshot storage with no extra charge for the logs, though the feature isn't supported for Multi-AZ DB clusters.
Snapshot export to S3 as Parquet works for MariaDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. Exported data can't be loaded back into a DB instance, so treat it as an analytics copy for reporting work.
If you run Aurora MySQL with Backtrack enabled at cluster creation or restore, it can rewind a cluster in place within a 72-hour window, and AWS bills it at $0.000000012 per change record per hour in us-east-1 as of October 2026.
Tradeoff: There's no table or row restore. Every PITR builds a new DB instance, so recovering one bad table means restoring everything and copying rows back by hand, and snapshots stay in the production account unless you copy them out.
3. AWS Backup: pay for storage you use
AWS Backup is the policy layer most multi-account teams add on top of native backups. One management account in AWS Organizations can set backup policy for every member account, which beats chasing retention settings one account at a time.
How it bills: You pay for backup storage, data transferred between Regions, data you restore, and backup evaluations, with no minimum fee. RDS snapshots bill at $0.095 per GB-month in us-east-1 as of October 2026, and restores of RDS snapshots are free.
Those snapshots count against the same free allocation as native backups, so moving to AWS Backup doesn't hand you a second free tier (it was worth asking).
What drives the bill: Retention and copies. Snapshot backups can run as often as every hour and stay for up to 100 years, and cold storage is listed as n/a for RDS, so long retention stays at the warm rate.
Cross-account copies require accounts in the same AWS Organization, and a copied continuous backup lands as a snapshot without PITR. Continuous backup goes back 35 days at most and doesn't cover RDS Multi-AZ clusters.
Vault Lock is the standout, and it costs nothing extra. In compliance mode, once a grace time of at least 72 hours ends, no user (and not even AWS) can change or delete the vault or its lock.
Encrypted Aurora clusters can also go into a logically air-gapped vault at $0.0242 per GB-month in us-east-1 as of October 2026. RDS DB instances can't, according to AWS's own feature table.
Tradeoff: Restores still create a new resource, and there's no item-level restore for RDS or Aurora. Scheduled restore testing helps you trust the backups, although it can't hand you back a single table.
4. Commvault (Clumio): per GiB-month, two tiers
Clumio is Commvault's AWS-native line, and it's one of the few options here with a published per-GiB price for RDS. A single policy covers in-account snapshots plus copies held in Clumio's SecureVault, for both RDS instances and Aurora clusters.
Commvault Cloud also protects RDS on its own across accounts and Regions, and Commvault lists Amazon RDS for Oracle among its supported Oracle targets, which fits its home turf of application-aware SAP and Oracle protection.
How it bills: SecureVault Standard is $0.14 per GiB-month for RDS as of October 2026, with incremental backups every 4 hours and $0 restores (data transfer out fees still apply). SecureVault Archive is $0.01 per GiB-month, plus $0.025 per GiB restored.
Aurora Standard lists lower at $0.030 per GiB-month as of October 2026, although it takes a full backup every four hours where RDS Standard runs incrementals, so model both against your own data.
What drives the bill: Tier choice. Archive has a one-month minimum and charges an early deletion fee on data kept under 12 months, so it rewards data you'll leave alone for a year or more.
Archive is also where the record-level option lives. You can retrieve individual records from an RDS backup and load them onto a database, after a thaw period of up to 48 hours.
Tradeoff: Standard costs more per GiB than native RDS snapshot storage, and Archive offers no full-database restore. Clumio also uses RDS manual snapshots, so AWS snapshot quotas still apply.
5. N2WS: flat monthly fee per instance
N2WS (now branded N2W) is a Linux-based virtual appliance you launch from an AMI in your own AWS account. It orchestrates native snapshots for RDS instances and Aurora clusters, including Aurora Serverless, and runs cross-Region and cross-account DR.
How it bills: A flat monthly subscription based on how many instances or VMs you protect, and N2W says the price doesn't move with how much data runs through them. As of October 2026, Standard is $249 per month for 20 instances, 3 accounts, and 3 users, with a discount for annual billing.
Advanced (50 instances) and Enterprise (200 instances) are "Let's talk" tiers, and every plan comes with a 30-day free trial.
What drives the bill: Instance count, plus the AWS costs underneath it. The server runs in your account, and the RDS backups it manages are native snapshots there too, so both show up on your AWS bill.
Aurora gets counted differently, with cluster storage calculated in 10 GiB increments against the license.
Copying RDS to an S3 repository relies on AWS's Export Snapshot capability, works for MySQL and PostgreSQL only, and skips Aurora. Those repositories can be protected with S3 Object Lock.
Tradeoff: You own the server, which means patching, upgrades that arrive as a new AMI, and OS changes that get wiped on upgrade. For a small platform team, that upkeep is part of the price.
6. Veeam: licensed per protected instance
Veeam's AWS protection now lives inside Veeam Backup & Replication 13 as the Veeam Plug-in for AWS, so it's the natural pick if your VM and hypervisor estate already runs on Veeam.
It covers RDS two ways: native snapshots replicated to any Region and account, and image-level backups of SQL Server and PostgreSQL kept in Amazon S3. For the image-level path, a worker instance spins up for the job and is removed when the session ends.
That worker pulls a native SQL Server backup or PostgreSQL dumps, which gives you database-level restores for those two engines. Few tools on this shortlist go below the instance for RDS.
How it bills: Per protected instance, and each RDS resource counts as one. An instance counts as protected if it has a policy-created restore point from the past 31 days, and the paid edition runs on a Veeam Universal License subscription.
A free edition covers up to 10 instances as of October 2026, but only on backup appliances no longer managed by a Veeam Backup & Replication server, and it excludes image-level PostgreSQL backups.
Veeam Data Cloud for AWS, the SaaS option, has a US page that describes all-inclusive pricing covering the service, immutable storage, and support, without a dollar figure.
What drives the bill: Instance count, since database size doesn't change the license. Worker instances deploy in your production account and Region for each job, so their compute lands on your AWS bill next to snapshot storage.
Tradeoff: Image-level backups cover SQL Server and PostgreSQL only, so every other engine, Aurora included, gets snapshots. Workers also need network plumbing (DNS resolution, a subnet with internet access or private endpoints, and two temporary security groups per job).
7. Druva: per TB after deduplication
Druva brings SaaS-delivered protection with an endpoint and SaaS lineage, extended into AWS. CloudRanger handles RDS snapshot scheduling, cross-Region and cross-account copies, and DR plans.
RDS Airgap is the SaaS layer, and it stores backups in Druva's cloud, outside your AWS Organization, with no infrastructure for you to run. Druva's Data Lock blocks alterations and deletions, although it's included only from the Enterprise plan up.
How it bills: Public Cloud plans (Business, Enterprise, and Elite, plus a free trial) are priced per TB per month after deduplication. As of October 2026, none shows a dollar figure, so you'll need a quote.
What drives the bill: Deduplicated TB, which is hard to predict until your own data runs through it. Druva lists zero egress and unlimited restores on every public cloud plan, and on Enterprise and Elite it says cross-Region copies carry no egress fee, which takes transfer off your list of surprises.
Cluster coverage needs a direct question. Druva's own AWS support matrix (dated October 2025) says RDS Cluster backup and restore is not currently supported, while its RDS Airgap guide (updated May 2026) says RDS clusters can be protected.
Tradeoff: Keeping backups in Druva's cloud is the point of the design, and it's also a vendor boundary your security team will review. Airgap copies don't support instances encrypted with AWS managed keys, and Druva documents no table- or record-level restore for RDS.
8. Rubrik: quote-only, through sales
Rubrik's lane is security-led cyber recovery and threat hunting, though its file-based scanning reads storage files, and a managed database like RDS never exposes its contents as files to scan.
For RDS, one console applies SLA policies across accounts and Regions for MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL, and Rubrik protects transaction logs for point-in-time recovery. Setup uses a cross-account IAM role created from a CloudFormation template.
How it bills: Quote only. Rubrik doesn't publish a price list as of October 2026, so every number comes out of a sales conversation.
What drives the bill: The deployment model you pick. Customer-hosted runs Rubrik's compute in your own AWS account with storage in a target you own, so those costs land on your AWS bill and the networking and IAM work lands on your team.
Rubrik Managed Cloud Protection runs compute and the vault in Rubrik's environment and locks every backup with Object Lock by default. It also moves data outside your AWS organization by design and offers fewer configuration options today.
Tradeoff: Rubrik's original RDS protection rides on native snapshots, so AWS's default quota of 100 manual snapshots per account per Region applies to it. Rubrik's RDS data sheet dates from September 2023 and doesn't name Aurora, although Rubrik announced Aurora protection separately in 2023.
How to model the bill before you sign
Run the same five checks for every vendor on your shortlist, using your real numbers.
- Start with the free allowance. Add up provisioned storage per Region, then compare it with what you keep today in automated backups and manual snapshots combined.
- Price year three of retention. A 35-day window and a seven-year compliance schedule produce very different bills at the same per-GB rate.
- Put instance pricing and GB pricing side by side. A flat per-instance license favors a few large databases, and per-GB pricing favors many small ones.
- Add restore and copy costs. As of October 2026, Commvault's Archive tier restores at $0.025 per GiB and AWS bills snapshot exports at $0.010 per GB of the whole snapshot in us-east-1, and cross-Region transfer belongs in the model too.
- Count the infrastructure you'd run. Servers, worker instances, and the hours to patch them are part of the cost even when the vendor's invoice doesn't show them.
Your retention schedule decides the RDS backup bill
Across all eight, the price per GB matters less than how long you keep data, how many copies you make, and how much engineer time a restore eats.
The cheapest line on day one (free native backups) can turn into the most expensive habit by year two, once manual snapshots pile up and nobody owns the cleanup.
So before you sign, model three years of retention at your real growth rate, including deleted instances and cross-Region copies, because forgotten backups keep billing every month until someone deletes them.
FAQ
Is Amazon RDS backup storage free?
RDS charges nothing for backup storage up to 100% of your total database storage in a Region, then bills $0.095 per GiB-month in us-east-1 as of October 2026. Retained automated backups and manual snapshots keep billing until you delete them.
Why do RDS backup bills keep growing?
Manual snapshots never expire, backups of terminated instances bill at the same per-GiB rate, and cross-Region copies add data transfer plus storage in a second Region. Once total backup storage passes your provisioned database storage, every extra GiB is billable.
Which RDS backup tools publish list prices?
As of October 2026, AWS publishes its RDS backup storage and AWS Backup rates, Commvault lists per-GiB prices for its AWS-native RDS and Aurora tiers, and N2WS lists its Standard tier at $249 per month. Veeam documents a free edition for up to 10 instances, while Druva and Rubrik price by quote.
