Is DynamoDB serverless?

Yes. DynamoDB is a fully managed, serverless NoSQL database. There are no servers to provision, patch, or scale: throughput scales automatically, you pay per request or provisioned capacity, and there are no maintenance windows or version upgrades. You interact with it purely through API calls, leaving all the infrastructure to AWS.

What "serverless" means here

DynamoDB offers zero infrastructure management, zero-downtime maintenance, instant scaling to demand, and pay-per-request billing. There are no cold starts, no version upgrades, and no maintenance windows — the classic serverless properties applied to a database.

How you pay

On-demand capacity — pay per read and write request; DynamoDB scales throughput automatically to your traffic, and scales down to zero so you pay nothing for throughput when a table has no traffic.
Provisioned capacity — reserve read and write units up front, with optional auto scaling, for stable workloads.

Storage is billed per GB-month regardless of mode.

What pay-per-request costs you

Pay-per-request carries a fixed premium over reserved capacity, and the ratio is computable. Using our synced AWS price table for us-east-1:

On-demand: $0.000000125 per read request unit, $0.000000625 per write request unit.
Provisioned: $0.00013 per RCU-hour, $0.00065 per WCU-hour, billed over 730 hours a month.

One RCU held for a month costs $0.0949 and can serve 2,628,000 read units (1 per second for 730 hours). A fully used provisioned unit therefore works out at $0.0000000361.

On-demand charges 3.46x that, and the write ratio is identical to four decimal places.

So the break-even is 28.9% sustained utilization. Below it, on-demand is cheaper even though its unit price is higher, because you stop paying for the idle 71%. Above it, you are paying a premium not to plan.

The other half of "scales to zero" is the floor. AWS's minimum provisioned throughput is 1 RCU and 1 WCU, which lists at $0.5694 a month whether or not the table is touched. On-demand's floor is $0.

In practice the always-free tier absorbs both floors: it covers 25 RCU and 25 WCU of provisioned capacity per account, so a dormant 1/1 table bills nothing until your account's tables collectively pass those 25 units — the arithmetic that decides which tables get the free allowance is on is DynamoDB free. Past that point, every additional idle provisioned table pays its $0.5694 floor and every idle on-demand table still pays $0.

Run your own numbers in the pricing calculator; it uses the same table these figures come from.

What AWS handles for you

Backups, security patching, replication, hardware, monitoring, and scaling are all managed by AWS. You never size or run a cluster.

Go deeper

Compare the two billing modes in on-demand vs provisioned capacity, estimate cost with the pricing calculator, and download DynoTable to work with your tables.

References

Last verified 2026-07-13 against the official AWS documentation linked above; the 1 RCU / 1 WCU minimum was re-checked 2026-07-28.

Prices computed 2026-07-28 from the us-east-1 rates in our synced AWS pricing table, the same source the pricing calculator uses. Free-tier allowances are excluded.