Serverless minimum OCU — modeled upfront
Amazon OpenSearch Pricing Calculator
Estimate Serverless OCU-hours vs provisioned data nodes before your RAG retrieval layer becomes the biggest line item on the bill.
- No signup
- Instant results
- ~3 min
Rates reviewed
Deployment model
us-east-1list rates, pricing as of 2026-10-17. NextGen scale-to-zero, UltraWarm, and dedicated master variants simplified. S3 Vectors not modeled. Source: AWS public pricing.
Compute configuration
Storage & transfer
Serverless only. For provisioned domains use EBS above; UltraWarm is separate.
Provisioned only — UltraWarm managed storage. Leave 0 if you only use EBS on data nodes.
Estimated OpenSearch Cost
Compute + storage
Total Monthly Cost
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FactualMinds architects RAG retrieval layers — OpenSearch Serverless, provisioned domains, and S3 Vectors tradeoffs.
Explore GenAI on AWS →Who This Tool Is For
Data engineers, AI/platform teams, and FinOps leads sizing OpenSearch for logs, search, or vector retrieval.
Why We Built This Tool
OpenSearch Serverless bills OCU-hours continuously — production collections have a ~$350/month minimum even when idle.
What Problem It Solves
- Idle Serverless floor. Minimum OCUs run 24/7 regardless of query volume.
- Dual OCU meters. Indexing and search capacity bill separately at $0.24/OCU-hour each.
- Provisioned vs Serverless. Small dev domains on t3.small.search can be 10–20× cheaper than Serverless minimums.
See GenAI on AWS or the Bedrock calculator.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do these OpenSearch prices come from?
Rates are AWS published us-east-1 list prices (Amazon OpenSearch pricing), pricing as of 2026-10-17.
What is the Serverless minimum cost?
Production collections require a minimum of 2 OCUs (1 indexing + 1 search with redundancy) at $0.24/OCU-hour — roughly $350/month at 730 hours. Dev/test without redundancy drops to 1 OCU total (~$175/month).
When does provisioned beat Serverless?
For steady, predictable workloads with high utilization, provisioned r6g nodes with Reserved Instances often win. For spiky or dev workloads below the Serverless floor, a small t3.small.search domain is dramatically cheaper.
Does this include UltraWarm or cold storage?
Managed storage at $0.024/GB-month covers Serverless storage and UltraWarm-style tiers. Dedicated UltraWarm instance hours are not modeled separately.
How does this relate to RAG vector search?
OpenSearch Serverless is a common vector store for RAG, but the minimum OCU floor makes it expensive for small corpora. Bedrock Knowledge Bases on S3 Vectors is an alternative for cost-sensitive retrieval — see our RAG pattern for architecture guidance.
Are Database Savings Plans available?
OpenSearch supports Reserved Instances on provisioned domains. Serverless OCU-hours may qualify for Database Savings Plans in some configurations — validate in the AWS pricing page for your region.
