by Rashed

We had a number in our heads: managed Redis, smallest HA tier, maybe $70 a month. We needed a Redis-class store for coordination primitives — JWT denylist, rate-limit counters, idempotency keys, distributed locks — and it had to survive a node dying, because some of those primitives sit on the money path. So we went to provision it.

The console had a different number. Memorystore for Redis Standard — the tier that actually gives you a high-availability replica — starts at 5GB. Not 1GB. The smallest HA config you can buy is $234/mo. We needed about 1.25GB. We were looking at paying 4.5× for capacity we'd never touch, purely to get the replica.

That gap between the number in our heads and the number on the screen is the whole story. We ended up on Memorystore for Valkey at $51/mo, with HA, and the migration cost us zero lines of code. Here's how we got there.

What the store is actually for