We Cut Our Redis Bill 75% With One Architectural Change

Our ElastiCache bill was $5,081/month. We thought it was $1,883. The hidden costs were killing us. The Real Cost of Redis Everyone knows the instance cost. Nobody measures the full picture: Cost Visible? Monthly Instance hours (3x r7g.xlarge) Yes $1,883 Cross-AZ data transfer Hidden $847 Serialization CPU overhead Hidden $1,200 Engineering time (cluster ops) Hidden $1,151 Total $5,081 The serialization tax is the worst. Every GET serializes the value to RESP protocol, transfers it over TCP, and