Cassandra Pricing: What Apache Cassandra Costs to Run and Support

Cassandra pricing starts at $0 for the software: Apache Cassandra is free under the Apache License 2.0, so the bill is servers, storage and on-call engineers. Amazon Keyspaces lists $0.625 per million writes and $0.125 per million reads in US East. DataStax (now IBM), Instaclustr and AceMQ support are priced by quote or calculator.

The table below uses public list prices checked on 22 October 2026. Cloud prices vary by region and discounts; confirm against your own account before budgeting.

Prices on paper leave out the work that fills incident queues. In AceMQ's Cassandra engagements the expensive problems were repairs that had not been completing across the ring, which made it unsafe to touch gc_grace_seconds, and queue-style tables that created tombstones faster than compaction retired them. For a connected-vehicle telematics provider, read timeouts stopped and tombstone scan counts fell by orders of magnitude once the data model moved to time-bucketed partitions with TTL expiry; the case is written up as Cassandra tombstone and read timeout remediation. A cluster assessment for a public sector agency found consistency levels that did not match its stated durability requirement, a baseline it had never had (Cassandra cluster health and capacity assessment).

Those costs sit in the self-managed and Keyspaces rows alike. A managed provider removes the repair and compaction chores but not the data-model decisions that cause tombstones and hot partitions.

Amazon Keyspaces scales with traffic, not nodes. At list price, 1 billion 1 KB writes cost $625 and 1 billion 4 KB reads cost $125, so 10 billion writes a month is $6,250 before storage ($250 per 1,000 GB-month). That suits spiky or modest traffic; steady high-volume write loads are where a fixed node count can start to compete. TTL deletes ($0.275 per million), point-in-time recovery ($0.20 per GB-month) and restores ($0.15 per GB) are billed separately.

Azure Managed Instance bills per node-hour by VM size, so cost follows cluster size and does not depend on request counts. Astra DB now sits inside IBM's watsonx.data pricing and plans, and Instaclustr prices nodes through its calculator. In each case, ask what is excluded: data transfer, backup retention, premium support and extra regions.

The Apache Cassandra download page ties support to release numbers, not dates: 5.0 (5.0.9) is maintained until the 8.0 release, 4.1 (4.1.12) until 7.0 and 4.0 (4.0.21) until 6.0, with the latest releases dated 7 August 2026. The page lists no 6.0 release yet, so all three are maintained today, but 4.0 drops out when 6.0 ships and none comes with an SLA. CVE fixes for older versions are applied case by case.

IBM lists standard support for DataStax Enterprise 6.x until 31 December 2027, with extended support to 31 December 2031 (IBM lifecycle page). Independent providers cover the rest: AceMQ supports self-managed Cassandra on any version, including the ones the project no longer maintains. Compare providers in which companies offer Apache Cassandra support.

This route keeps your infrastructure and budget control and adds a named senior engineer on call. AceMQ's Apache Cassandra support is quoted after we understand your environments, access and the cluster's technical history: topology, repair history and compaction backlog, the same evidence a cluster assessment collects. Whether a support contract costs less than a managed per-node service depends on your node count and how much operations work your team wants to keep.

ScyllaDB is a Cassandra-compatible NoSQL database. In December 2024 it announced a move from open source AGPL to a source-available license, and OSS AGPL 6.2 stands as the last open source release (ScyllaDB announcement). Its FAQ limits the free tier to 10 TB of total storage and 50 vCPUs per organization. Check the license terms before treating it as a drop-in open source replacement.

Amazon Keyspaces is the lowest-effort alternative if you are on AWS and want no cluster to run, at the price of request-based billing and a compatible, not identical, feature set. Test your queries and consistency needs against it before committing. If the reason for looking is a version that has lost maintenance, upgrading Apache Cassandra in place is usually the smaller change.

• Apache Cassandra: Downloads and maintained versions, checked 22 October 2026
• Apache Cassandra: License (Apache License 2.0)
• Amazon Keyspaces pricing (request unit definitions, free tier)
• AWS Price List API: Amazon Keyspaces, US East (N. Virginia), published 14 September 2026
• Microsoft Azure: Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra pricing
• Azure Retail Prices API, East US, queried 22 October 2026
• IBM: watsonx.data pricing (Cassandra tiers in resource units)
• IBM: DataStax, an IBM company (Astra DB, Hyper-Converged Database)
• IBM Support: DataStax Enterprise 6.x lifecycle
• DBTA: IBM officially closes acquisition of DataStax
• Instaclustr: Pricing calculator
• ScyllaDB: License change announcement, 18 December 2024
• ScyllaDB: Source-available FAQ (free tier limits)