Cluster Configuration Costs
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Cloud Service Provider and Region
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.
Cluster Tier
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.
Storage Capacity
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.
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.
For most cluster types, you can increase storage speed from Standard to Fast or Fastest, which affects costs. Selecting a custom speed changes both IOPS and the type of storage used. The storage type changes from a general-purpose SSD to a provisioned-IOPS SSD. To learn more about storage types, see Amazon EBS Volume Types.
All clusters use premium SSD disks with IOPS based on the storage capacity. The maximum IOPS increases as you increase storage capacity for the cluster in the same tier. The cost of the increased IOPS is included in the cost of the increased storage capacity. If you choose to increase IOPS in addition to the increased IOPS that comes with the increased storage capacity, MongoDB charges you more.
To learn more, see Change Storage Capacity and IOPS on Azure and High-performance Premium Storage and Managed Disks for VMs.
All clusters use SSD persistent disks with fixed maximum IOPS based on the cluster storage capacity. The maximum IOPS increases as storage capacity increases. The cost of the increased maximum IOPS is included in the cost of the increased storage capacity. To learn more about the Google Cloud persistent disks, see Persistent Disks.
Cluster Auto-Scaling
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.
Backup
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).
Cloud Backups
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 over the public internet or for downloading the snapshot over private endpoints for Atlas clusters on AWS or Azure with private endpoints. These costs vary by cloud provider and region. To learn more, see Private Endpoints for Dedicated Clusters.
Cloud Backup Considerations
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 Cluster.
If you have questions on Cloud Backup backup sizing and pricing, contact Atlas support:
In Atlas, go to the Project Support page.
If it's not already displayed, select the organization that contains your desired project from the Organizations menu in the navigation bar.
If it's not already displayed, select your desired project from the Projects menu in the navigation bar.
Next to the Projects menu, expand the Options menu, then click Project Support.
The Project Support page displays.
Continuous Cloud Backups
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.
Multi-Region Snapshot Distribution Costs
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). Furthermore, when copying backups to a GCP region, snapshot incrementality is not preserved. This can lead to an exponential increase in cost, especially for customers with large data sizes, as each copied snapshot is a full snapshot. For example, if you have a cluster with 1TB of data and your current backup storage amount in your billing invoice shows an average of 3TB of backup storage (due to the incremental changes in your data over time), copying 10 backups to another region in GCP will incur 1TB of data transfer cost for each copy and 10TB of backup storage for the secondary backup region (1TB of data size * 10 copied snapshots).
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, enabling backup copies in a Google Cloud region will likely result in exponentially higher costs compared to other cloud providers.
In AWS and Azure regions, the incrementality of your backups is preserved during the copy process.
Lowering the Monthly Rate
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.
BI Connector for Atlas
Important
Atlas BI Connector is approaching end-of-life. It will be deprecated and no longer supported in June 2025.
MongoDB is transitioning away from the BI Connector for Atlas to Atlas SQL. To learn about transitioning to the new interface, see Transition from Atlas BI Connector to Atlas SQL.
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.
Number of Nodes
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. |