Upstash

Upstash is a serverless data platform offering Redis, a vector database, Kafka-compatible messaging, and QStash (message queues and scheduling) over HTTP, with consumption-based pricing — you pay per request, not per hour. The HTTP-based design makes it edge-compatible and trivial to use from serverless functions and AI agents without managing persistent connections.

The company raised a $10 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in 2024 after growing from 12,000 to 85,000 developers in two years on a $1.9M seed. Its vector database, launched as generative AI took off, targets RAG workloads: store embeddings, run semantic search, and scale from a free tier to production without provisioning infrastructure.

Limitations: HTTP-based Redis adds latency versus in-VPC TCP Redis for chatty workloads; the free tiers are capped (10K commands/day for Redis, 10K queries/day for vector); and at high sustained throughput, per-request pricing can exceed the cost of a provisioned instance — run the numbers before scaling.

Sign up at upstash.com; create a database in the console and copy the REST URL and token; use the @upstash/redis or @upstash/vector SDKs.