How Dragonfly Delivers 80% Lower Costs Than Redis?
Discover how Dragonfly’s architecture, memory efficiency, and lower pricing can cut Redis costs by up to 80%. Learn the key savings drivers.
August 12, 2025
Introduction
Countless customers have switched from Redis to Dragonfly and reduced their overall in-memory data infrastructure costs by up to 80%, but the first question new customers always have is: "How is that possible?" This blog post is a breakdown of the fundamental differences in architecture and technology, like true multi-threading, smarter memory usage, and a much more lightweight system overall. We’ll explore exactly how Dragonfly delivers such dramatic cost reductions.
TL;DR
There are three key ways in which Dragonfly Cloud is able to deliver up to 80% cost reduction over managed Redis solutions:
- A unique, multi-threaded architecture that lets Dragonfly serve the same workload with dramatically less infrastructure (~40% reduction in cost on average).
- Better overall memory efficiency (~20% reduction in cost on average).
- Lower price per unit of memory (~20% reduction in cost on average).
Multi-Threading and Cost Savings
Dragonfly’s multi-threaded shared-nothing architecture allows for massive concurrent operations, maximizing CPU utilization and boosting overall performance. Unlike Redis, which can be bottlenecked by its single-threaded nature, Dragonfly efficiently distributes its workload into multiple threads, making it ideal for high-throughput or CPU-demanding applications.
Dragonfly’s architectural design doesn’t just deliver a ton of performance and scaling value, it slashes the number of nodes needed to handle equivalent Redis workloads, especially those that are CPU-bound. Let’s dig into a specific example to show you just how big the impact can be.
A recent Dragonfly Cloud customer was running a high-throughput machine learning feature store on ElastiCache, serving 2.5M requests per second. The dataset wasn’t massive (just ~100GB), but the traffic was heavy. To handle it, they relied on a primary cache.r7g.4xlarge instance with 3 read replicas—four high-powered nodes each with 16 vCPUs and at $1.745/hour to run, which comes out to $1,273.85/month, so around $5,100/month for the entire workload. And because Redis handles data manipulation with a single thread, only a fraction of the total 64 vCPUs were being utilized at any given time, which repeatedly resulted in bottlenecks under peak load.
After switching to Dragonfly Cloud, they were able to run the same workload with just two instances: a 100GB standard-tier instance and a single replica. At $8/GB/month in the AWS US East (N. Virginia) region, that’s $1,600 per month total—69% less than what they were paying. Even better? Unlike Redis, Dragonfly puts all CPU cores of the nodes to work. The result: lower cost, higher throughput, and no more peak-hour slowdowns.
Better Memory Efficiency
The Dragonfly engineering team has deeply optimized nearly every core data structure for more efficiency. While all customers benefit from the improvement in overall memory efficiency, the results vary depending on the data types and the profile of the workload. Let’s dive into a specific example of a customer who was running complex commands on large sorted sets.
This customer was running a relatively low throughput (peak traffic of 100k requests per second) workload that was consuming 310GB of memory on Redis. They were running in the GCP US East (Ohio) region, which required a 13-node cluster of the Large instance type on Redis Cloud and was costing them $5,722/month.
After migrating the exact same data set to Dragonfly Cloud, they saw a 40% reduction in memory usage, down to 190GB in the data store, thanks in part to Dragonfly’s highly efficient B+-tree-based sorted set implementation, which uses significantly less memory than the traditional skiplist data structure. They were able to run this workload on a single 200GB standard-tier node, which cost $1,960/month in the same region, resulting in a total cost reduction of 65%.
Lower Price Per Unit of Memory
Redis-based services like ElastiCache come with significant hidden memory overhead, which results in the customer paying a much higher amount per GB of memory than initially apparent. Take the cache.r7g.4xlarge instance as an example: while it’s backed by a 128GiB EC2 instance, AWS advertises only 105.81GiB as usable memory due to system reservations. But when you run the INFO command on the instance, you learn that AWS actually makes only 79.36GiB (or 85.21GB) available to your application by default while the rest is reserved again for Redis operations. This instance in the US East region costs $1.745/hour, or $1,273.85/month, which works out to $15/GB/month of actual usable memory.
Dragonfly Cloud is built for efficiency. We eliminate the excess overhead and keep pricing simple: a flat price per GB of provisioned memory, which equals 100% available memory—whatever you provision is entirely yours. Although the unit price varies by region and cloud, for the same AWS US East region as above, Dragonfly Cloud costs $8/GB/month of available memory. That’s nearly 50% less than ElastiCache. With Dragonfly Cloud, you pay for what you provision, not what your provider consumes.
Migration Path
The cost of migration is a key consideration when making any sort of change in technology, especially with a core piece of data infrastructure. Dragonfly is 100% wire-compatible with Redis, requiring zero to minimal code changes for migration. While operational adjustments may be needed depending on how your Dragonfly configuration differs from your existing Redis setup, most customers complete the migration in just a few hours, or at most, a couple of days.
Conclusion
While not every workload will see savings in all three areas, and 80% is on the high side of the cost savings any customer can expect, we’re fully confident in delivering at least a 30% cost reduction for any customer with 100GB or more data on a hosted Redis service. Let us prove it: Get in touch here for a customized quote!
