Free Tier: First three months (30M write request units, 30M read request units, 1 GB storage per month).
Min cost: $0 (free tier)
Pricing: On-demand and provisioned; AWS Database Savings Plans supported
Time to first query: Seconds (create table, start writing)
Key features: CQL compatibility, serverless, replication across 3 AZs, multi-Region replication, TTL, point-in-time recovery, CDC Streams (pull API), client-side timestamps, logged batches, User Defined Types (UDTs) including nested UDTs, frozen collections, pre-warming, IPv6, customer-managed KMS keys
Limitations: No JOINs, no secondary indexes, no full-text search, no complex analytical queries, per-row 1 MB size, some CQL features unsupported
Best for: Cassandra migrations, CQL/Cassandra-driver applications, high-throughput write-heavy workloads, event-driven pipelines via CDC Streams, IoT device registries, fleet and time-series-style data already modeled in CQL
Not for: Relational/transactional joins, full-text search, analytics, teams without a CQL/Cassandra requirement (DynamoDB is the default key-value choice)