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Cluster Configuration Costs

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  • Cloud Service Provider and Region
  • Cluster Tier
  • Backup
  • BI Connector for Atlas
  • Number of Nodes

Atlas supports deploying clusters onto Amazon Web Services, the Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. The choice of cloud service provider and region or regions for the Atlas project affects the cost of running a Atlas cluster.

Multi-region cluster costs depend on the number of and location of additional regions selected. When creating a cluster, Atlas displays the cluster tier cost based on only the Preferred Region of the cluster. You can see the total cost of running the cluster in the Cluster Overview.

To learn more about configuring your cloud provider and region, see Cloud Providers and Regions.

Atlas provides different cluster tiers. Each cluster tier has a default RAM capacity, storage capacity, and maximum storage speed. The cluster's per-hour charge includes these default values. Atlas uses the selected cluster when deploying all the data-bearing [1] servers in your cluster.

Depending on the choice of cloud service provider, Atlas provides customization options for cluster storage capacity and the speed of that storage. If you add capacity or speed, you incur additional costs on top of the base cost. For multi-region clusters, the per-cluster cost, including any selected customizations, is relative to the Preferred Region. The Cluster Overview box shows your overall charges.

Atlas charges for storage capacity differently depending on whether you use the cluster default or specify a custom storage capacity.

  • If you use the default storage capacity, Atlas includes its cost in the cluster's per-hour cost.

  • If you customize the amount of storage capacity, Atlas charges for the full amount of storage. Atlas doesn't deduct the cost of the default storage capacity. This change can be a disk upgrade or a instance family change such as changing from general CPU to low-CPU.

Example

A new M10 cluster defaults to 10 GB of storage. You can increase this amount up to 120 GB of storage using this cluster tier.

If you increase the storage capacity to 50 GB, your monthly Atlas cost includes 50 GB of storage, not the cost of the additional 40 GB.

Note

Increasing storage capacity can change the maximum IOPS available with each Custom Storage Speed.

Atlas measures storage speed as maximum IOPS. Each Atlas cluster tier offers a default storage speed that is included in the cluster's per-hour cost. The choice of cloud service provider and cluster affects the available storage speed customization options, as well as the cost of selecting a custom storage speed.

To help minimize cluster costs while retaining the flexibility to easily scale your cluster, you can enable Cluster Auto-Scaling. With auto-scaling, your cluster automatically scales its tier, storage capacity, or both in response to cluster usage. Auto-scaling reduces the need to manually optimize your cluster to adapt to your current workload.

Atlas supports Cloud Backups. For each cluster with cloud backups enabled, Atlas bills you for:

  • Storage costs for data in your replica set

  • Storage costs for the configuration server replica set in sharded deployments

  • Network transfer costs of restoring a snapshot

To learn how Atlas charges for network data, see Data Transfer.

To learn about legacy backups, see Legacy Backups (Deprecated).

Important

If you enabled Continuous Cloud Backups, Atlas bills you using the rates given for Continuous Cloud Backups.

Atlas cloud backups provides localized backup storage using the native snapshot functionality of the cluster's cloud service provider. Snapshots in Cloud Backups are incremental snapshots, where in most cases after the first snapshot, a new snapshot saves only the data that changed after your most recent snapshot. For example, a cluster with 10 GB of data and 3 snapshots may require less than 30 GB of total snapshot storage depending on how data changed between snapshots.

Incrementality is determined by your cluster's cloud service provider. To compute the cost for Cloud Backups, Atlas obtains the raw metric data from the cloud providers and calculates the total size of all snapshots based on the region where it stores the snapshot and the amount of storage used per month.

The cost for Cloud Backups is calculated per GB per month. Rates vary between cloud providers and between regions within a given cloud provider.

Cloud Provider
Cost per GB

AWS

$0.14 to $0.19

Azure

$0.34 to $0.65

Google Cloud

$0.08 to $0.12

While this rate determines the cost of the backup, your bill displays this item in terms of GB days. This appears as a line item each day, but does not result in duplicated charges. Each backup retained on a given day contributes to the total GB days billed for that day.

Example

You back up 400 GB of data from a cluster in an AWS region with a $0.14 per month Cost per GB, yielding a cost of $56.00.

To determine the price in GB days, use the following formula:

((GB per month rate) * 12 months)/365 days.

In this case: ($0.14 * 12)/365 = $0.004603. A 400 GB backup will appear in your billing statement as 400 GB days at a price of $0.004603, for a total cost of $1.84 for the day. In a 30-day month, the cost of retaining one 400 GB backup totals $55.20.

Note

Atlas applies a default backup policy to Cloud Backup-enabled clusters on creation. Review and change the backup policy as needed.

Atlas can bill backup as high as the total storage capacity of the volume. This depends upon how the cloud provider stores the volume snapshots.

When restoring a cluster using a manual download via HTTPS, Atlas also charges for:

  • Each hour that the download link remains active (Atlas Backup Download VM charge).

  • The total storage capacity of the restore virtual machine data volume (Atlas Backup Restore Storage charge).

  • Data transfer costs for downloading the snapshot. These costs will vary by cloud provider and region.

Note

You can't download Backup snapshots that you encrypted using KMS.

Atlas can retain more than one full snapshot per replica set or shard in certain cases. This may result in a higher invoice due to less overall snapshot incrementality. Atlas might retain more than one full snapshot in the following cases:

  • When a snapshot is taken on a different node than the previous snapshot due to node or region failover.

  • When a cluster's configuration changes (including cluster tier, storage volume, or IOPS).

  • When region priority changes for a multi-region cluster and a new node becomes responsible for snapshots.

  • During maintenance performed by the cluster’s cloud provider.

If Atlas must retain more than one snapshot, Atlas stores the new snapshot in the same region as the cluster's current backup node. Atlas continues using that backup node for snapshots and snapshot storage.

Atlas might charge for backup up to the total storage capacity of the volume, depending on how your cloud provider stores volume snapshots.

Example

A storage volume on the cloud provider has a capacity of 4 TB. The cloud provider informs Atlas that the snapshots occupy the full volume capacity even though your backups only occupy 500 GB. Due to this reporting, Atlas bills you for 4 TB in backup storage.

To learn more about how Atlas manages snapshot storage, see Back Up Your Database Deployment.

If you have questions on Cloud Backup backup sizing and pricing, please contact Atlas support by clicking Support from the left-hand navigation of the Atlas UI.

Cluster owners may enable Continuous Cloud Backup restores from Cloud Backups. PIT backups are billed based on the disk space occupied by an internal oplog, combined with the cloud backup snapshot size.

You can configure PIT backups to cover a window of time that you specify. Longer backup windows result in larger oplogs and higher backup costs.

To compute the cost for Continuous Cloud Backups, Atlas obtains the raw metric data from the cloud providers and calculates the total size of all snapshots and the amount of storage used per month:

  • The cloud provider

  • The region in which the snapshots are stored

  • The usage tier

Cloud Provider
0-5 GB Storage Used (Tier 0)
5-100 GB Storage Used (Tier 1)
100-250 GB Storage Used (Tier 2)
250-500 GB Storage Used (Tier 3)
>500 GB Storage Used (Tier 4)

AWS

$1.00 to $1.55
$0.75 to $1.20
$0.50 to $0.80
$0.25 to $0.40

Azure

$1.00 to $3.95
$0.75 to $2.95
$0.50 to $2.00
$0.55 to $1.00

Google Cloud

$0.60 to $0.95
$0.45 to $0.70
$0.30 to $0.50
$0.15 to $0.25

Example

A cluster on AWS in the US_EAST_1 region has a combined total snapshot and oplog size of 115 GB. The first 5 GB are free. The remaining 110 GB are billed at $1.00 from 5 to 100 GB, and at $0.75 from 100 GB to 115 GB:

(95 × $1.00) + (15 × $0.75) = $106.25 per month

Note

Atlas applies a default backup policy to Cloud Backup-enabled clusters on creation. Review and change the backup policy as needed.

Atlas bills you for the following items:

  • Cross region data transfer when you copy your backups to another region.

  • Enabling Additional Backup Copies for your cluster, and using additional storage in other regions. For example, if you copy all of your backups to one additional region, you pay for approximately twice the storage: an amount for your standard backup, and approximately the same amount for your copies stored in the other region (storage costs vary by region).

    Important

    Google Cloud Platform

    In Google Cloud regions, the incrementality of your backups is not preserved. Each copy stored in Google Cloud is a full copy. Because of this, Google Cloud backup copies might incur higher costs than the original incremental backup copies.

    In AWS and Azure regions, the incrementality of your backups is preserved during the copy process.

The amount that you can reduce your costs varies depending on your deployment's configuration. You can reduce your Atlas backup costs in the following ways:

  • Delete unneeded backup snapshots

  • Reduce the frequency that Atlas creates backup snapshots

  • Reduce the retention time of backup snapshots

  • Modify the backup policy to reduce the number of snapshots automatically copied to additional regions

  • Increase the efficiency of your application's database access patterns for better snapshot incrementality (for example, using a simple insert instead of updating an array is a more efficient operation and might improve snapshot incrementality)

  • Change the cluster’s backup cloud provider or region

  • Reduce the restore window duration (for continuous cloud backups only)

Note

When you delete a snapshot, deleted data that exists in any other snapshot is still counted as unique data. Unique data is only deleted from the sequence of snapshots if all snapshots that reference that data are deleted.

Excluding MongoDB Atlas Enterprise and MongoDB Atlas Platinum customers, if BI Connector for Atlas is enabled for your cluster:

  • The billing rate for the BI Connector for Atlas is described in the cluster console as a daily uplift on the cost of the associated cluster. You can view the rate when deploying your cluster or by modifying your cluster.

  • BI Connector for Atlas has a sustained-usage pricing. That is, the daily rate is charged only up to a maximum for the month.

Atlas charges the cluster cost and data storage cost for each data-bearing node [1] in your cluster.

  • For a replica set, the number of data-bearing nodes equals the replication factor.

  • For a sharded cluster, the number of data-bearing nodes equals the replication factor multiplied by the number of shards.

If you enable sharding, Atlas also runs three config servers in addition to your data-bearing nodes. Your selections for cluster tier and data storage do not affect the costs of the config nodes. Config servers are charged at a separate rate. Their cost is reflected in the cost of the cluster.

[1](1, 2) For replica sets, the data-bearing servers are the servers hosting the replica set nodes. For sharded clusters, the data-bearing servers are the servers hosting the shards. For sharded clusters, Atlas also deploys servers for the config servers; these are charged at a rate separate from the cluster costs.
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