A Scan of a million 327-byte orders reads about 40,000 request units, half a cent. Run it every five minutes for a dashboard and it is $43 a month; at 100 million orders, $4,337. The arithmetic from measured item sizes, and the four alternatives: Stream-fed aggregates, exports to S3 with Athena, zero-ETL to an analytics store, or Postgres.
Monthly read cost of one dashboard query that Scans the table every five minutes (8,640 runs a month). From our measurement of 0.0402 read units per 327-byte item scanned, eventually consistent, $0.125 per million. Log scale.
The bill isn't the only cost. A Scan reads 1 MB per page, so a million of these items is about 315 sequential requests unless you split it into parallel segments, and it uses throughput your users' requests also need. Every additional dashboard tile that scans multiplies all of it.
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Ad-Hoc Questions on DynamoDB vs Postgres: 16 Analytics Queries at 100,000, 1 Million and 5 Million Orders
Every question across customers is a full table scan in DynamoDB: 217,000 read units at 5 million orders, whether it returns 10 rows or all of them. Postgres answered the same 16 questions in 0.08 to 2.7 seconds without a single index added for them, and an index built in 2.7 seconds took one from 148 ms to 44 ms. Measured in AWS.
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DynamoDB vs Aurora Postgres Cost by Traffic: Where Each One Is Cheaper
For a typical app workload (80% small reads, 20% writes, one secondary index), DynamoDB on-demand costs about $0.30 per million requests: $3 a month at 10 million, $300 at a billion. Aurora Serverless v2 bills for capacity whether or not requests arrive: $43.80 a month at its 0.5 ACU floor, $175 at 2 ACUs. A chart of where the lines cross, and npm data on which way teams are going.
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As of November 4, 2026. Provided as is, for general information, and accurate to the best of our knowledge on the date shown. Not legal, compliance, tax, financial or other professional advice. Prices, limits and vendor services change; check current vendor documentation before relying on anything here. Terms of use.