What is Upstash and how does it differ from self-hosted Redis?
Upstash is a serverless data platform offering managed Redis, Vector DB, QStash (messaging), and Search via HTTP/REST APIs. Unlike self-hosted Redis, there are no servers to provision or maintain, pricing is per-request, and data is automatically replicated across global regions for low latency.
Does Upstash work with serverless and edge functions?
Yes. All Upstash products use HTTP/REST APIs instead of persistent TCP connections, making them fully compatible with Vercel Edge Functions, Cloudflare Workers, Fastly Compute, AWS Lambda, and any other serverless or edge runtime.
What is included in the Upstash free tier?
The free tier provides 256 MB of Redis storage with 500K commands/month, 1K QStash messages/day with 10 schedules, a vector index with up to 10K documents, and 10 GB of bandwidth. No credit card is required.
How does Upstash pricing work at scale?
Upstash offers three models: pay-as-you-go ($0.2 per 100K Redis commands, $1 per 100K QStash messages), fixed monthly plans starting at $10/month for predictable workloads, and enterprise plans with custom pricing for high-throughput applications exceeding 100K commands/second.
What is QStash and when should I use it?
QStash is a serverless message queue and task scheduler. Use it for background jobs, webhook delivery, delayed task execution, and workflow orchestration. It supports scheduling up to 1 year in advance, automatic retries (free of charge), dead-letter queues, and URL group broadcasting.
Is Upstash compatible with existing Redis clients?
Upstash supports the Redis protocol, so most standard Redis clients work. It also provides its own HTTP-based SDK (@upstash/redis) optimized for serverless environments. Some advanced Redis modules may not be fully supported — check the documentation for compatibility details.