Unlock cost savings with incremental snapshot billing for Amazon Redshift Serverless and Amazon Redshift RG

Amazon Redshift customers rely heavily on snapshots, which are point-in-time backups of their data, for disaster recovery, compliance retention, and data portability across AWS Regions. Amazon Redshift supports two types of snapshots: automated and manual. For provisioned clusters, automated snapshots are enabled by default and retained for up to 35 days; manual snapshots persist until you delete them. For serverless workgroups, Amazon Redshift automatically creates recovery points that are retained for 24 hours, and you can also create manual snapshots with a configurable retention period. For details on snapshot creation and backup storage pricing, you can refer to Amazon Redshift pricing for more details.

Starting June 8, 2026, Amazon Redshift is introducing an incremental snapshot billing model for Amazon Redshift Serverless and Amazon Redshift RG (provisioned instances powered by AWS Graviton). With this enhancement, you pay only for the unique data blocks across your active manual snapshots within your account. This delivers significant cost savings for customers who have multiple snapshots that contain largely identical data blocks.

In this post, you will learn how the new incremental snapshot billing model works, the customer use cases it addresses, and how it helps you optimize costs while improving your Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

Incremental snapshot billing

With this new billing model, Amazon Redshift bills manual snapshots based on unique data blocks. When you take multiple manual snapshots of the same workgroup or cluster, much of the data remains unchanged between snapshots. The billing model recognizes this overlap and charges only for the unique data blocks across your active snapshots. Data that has not changed between snapshots is counted once.

Consider a 10 TB data warehouse with three manual snapshots:

• Snapshot 1 (Day 1): Full backup, 10 TB of unique data blocks
• Snapshot 2 (seconds later): Nothing changed, shares data blocks with Snapshot 1, no additional charge
• Snapshot 3 (two days later): 1 TB of new unique data blocks created from changes
• Total billed: 11 TB of unique data blocks

Using this example, customers pay for the 10 TB of unique data blocks in Snapshot 1 plus the 1 TB of new unique data block in Snapshot 3. Snapshot 2 shares its blocks with Snapshot 1, so it adds zero cost. Hence, total 11 TB of unique data blocks are billed.

Key billing model details

With the new incremental snapshot billing model, you are charged only for the unique data blocks at the existing snapshot rates. Following are the key details of the new feature:

• Scope: Amazon Redshift Serverless and Amazon Redshift RG instances. Amazon Redshift RA3 instances retains the current tiered S3 billing.
• Rate: Based on the existing snapshot pricing for your Region.
• Deduplication level: Account-level for Amazon Redshift Serverless and RG.
• Automated snapshots: Unchanged, still available at no additional cost (35 days for Provisioned, 1 day for Serverless).
• Existing snapshots: Automatically transition to the incremental snapshot billing model. No action required.

This model is especially valuable for customers needing backup retention beyond the automated snapshot windows available at no additional cost. Serverless customers needing backup beyond 24 hours can now take manual snapshots knowing they pay for a unique data block, making extended retention more practical and affordable.

Benefits

With the incremental snapshot billing model, customer can adopt stronger data protection strategies at optimized costs:

Compliance-driven long-term retention

Regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, government, and life sciences) must often retain backups for 90 days to 5+ years. Since this billing model charges only for unique data blocks, retention policies become significantly more affordable as snapshots accumulate.

How this feature helps: You can now maintain backup retention (90-day, 1-year, 7-year) on Amazon Redshift Serverless and RG at optimized cost. A 10 TB warehouse with 5% daily change rate retaining 90 days of daily snapshots pays for ~14.5 TB of unique data blocks total across all snapshots.

Disaster recovery with better Recovery Point and Time Objectives (RPO/ RTO)

Many customers want more frequent snapshots (hourly instead of daily) for tighter recovery objectives. Because each additional snapshot is billed only for its new unique data blocks, frequent backups are practical and affordable.

How this feature helps: You can take hourly snapshots where each one adds only ~0.2% in new unique data (assuming 5% daily change rate). More snapshots mean more recovery points and less data loss in a failure scenario, all at optimized cost.

Cross-Region disaster recovery at lower cost

Snapshots copied to another region for disaster recovery are also billed based on unique data blocks. Organizations maintaining multi-Region disaster recovery (DR) strategies pay proportionally to actual data changes, making geographic redundancy affordable.

How this feature helps: If you are running active-passive or active-active multi-Region architectures, you can copy snapshots across Regions more frequently, improving cross-Region RPO while keeping DR costs proportional to actual data changes rather than full dataset size.

Affordable extended backups

With the incremental snapshot billing model, extended manual backups are more affordable for customers, regardless of their workload size. Even retention policies (7-day, 14-day) cost proportionally to actual data changes, for enhanced data protection posture across the board.

How this feature helps: Customers no longer need to choose between data protection and budget. This billing model helps make extended retention cost effective for workloads of varying sizes.

Pricing example

For example, you have an Amazon Redshift Serverless workgroup with 10 TB of active data in US East (Ohio). You take daily manual snapshots with 7-day retention. Your data changes at 5% per day (0.5 TB/day).

Because shared blocks across snapshots are counted only once. You pay for 13 TB of unique snapshot data rather than the full cumulative size of all seven daily snapshots.

Compounding savings on Amazon Redshift RG

If you are evaluating migrating from RA3 to RG, the savings stack significantly. Some of the compounding savings on RG include:

• RG instances are priced at 30% discount as compared to RA3 instances.
• Reserved Instances (RI) pricing is available for RG which provide further compute savings.
• Incremental billing alleviates duplicate snapshot charges for backup storage.
• Data lake queries are included in RG compute pricing, thereby avoiding the per-terabyte scanning charges of Amazon Redshift Spectrum.

The combined effect of these options for RG can deliver an aggregate greater than 30% cost reduction over RA3. You can lock in RI pricing on RG clusters for predictable, long-term savings on top of the incremental snapshot benefit.

Getting started

No action is required on your end. Your existing manual snapshots automatically transition to the incremental snapshot billing model on June 8, 2026.

To maximize the benefit:

1. Review your current snapshot usage in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console.
2. Increase snapshot frequency. More frequent snapshots now cost proportionally less since each additional snapshot only adds its unique data blocks to your bill.
3. Extend retention policies. Compliance driven retention (90-day, 1-year, 7-year) is now significantly more affordable.
4. Evaluate RA3 to RG migration. Consider the 30% compute savings, combined with RI eligibility during RG evaluation for migrating from RA3.
5. Explore Serverless. The enhanced billing model makes Serverless a cost-effective option for customers who need backup retention beyond the 24-hour automated recovery point window.

Conclusion

The incremental snapshot billing model for Amazon Redshift Serverless and Amazon Redshift RG charges only for unique data blocks across your snapshots. This supports more frequent snapshots for better disaster recovery, affordable long-term compliance retention, and a compelling path to Amazon Redshift Serverless adoption. Combined with Amazon Redshift RG’s 30% compute discount and Reserved Instances, this delivers meaningful total cost savings across your entire Amazon Redshift spend.

Review your snapshot strategy today and share your feedback on AWS re:Post. For full pricing details, visit the Amazon Redshift pricing page.

About the authors

Nidhi Nayak
Nidhi is a Senior Technical Account Manager with AWS, she helps enterprise customers build scalable, high-performance cloud applications and optimize cloud operations. With over a decade of experience in Data Analytics, Nidhi currently focuses on Redshift & Generative AI integration with Redshift.

Raza Hafeez
Raza is a Senior Product Manager, Technical at Amazon Redshift. He has 15+ years of experience building and optimizing enterprise data warehouses and is passionate about making cloud analytics accessible and cost-effective for customers of all sizes.

Sushmita Barthakur
Sushmita is a Senior Data Solutions Architect at AWS, supporting Strategic customers architect their data workloads on AWS. With a background in data analytics, she has extensive experience helping customers architect and build enterprise data lakes, ETL workloads, data warehouses and data analytics solutions, both on-premises and the cloud. Sushmita is based in Florida and enjoys traveling, reading and playing tennis.

Amy Huang
Amy is a Senior Financial Analyst at AWS and a CPA with over 7 years of progressive experience across Strategic Finance, Banking, and Auditing. She specializes in pricing, financial modeling and valuation, and data-driven analysis. Outside of work, she enjoys yoga and hiking.