Upstash Has Free Serverless Redis — Zero-Config Caching and Rate Limiting for Edge Functions

Why Upstash?

Upstash is serverless Redis with per-request pricing. Pay $0 for idle time. Works with Vercel Edge, Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy — any edge runtime.

npm install @upstash/redis

import { Redis } from '@upstash/redis'

const redis = Redis.fromEnv()  // reads UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL + TOKEN

await redis.set('user:123', { name: 'John', plan: 'pro' })
const user = await redis.get('user:123')

Rate Limiting

npm install @upstash/ratelimit

import { Ratelimit } from '@upstash/ratelimit'
import { Redis } from '@upstash/redis'

const ratelimit = new Ratelimit({
  redis: Redis.fromEnv(),
  limiter: Ratelimit.slidingWindow(10, '60 s'),  // 10 requests per minute
})

export async function middleware(request) {
  const ip = request.headers.get('x-forwarded-for')
  const { success } = await ratelimit.limit(ip)
  if (!success) return new Response('Rate limited', { status: 429 })
}

QStash (Message Queue)

import { Client } from '@upstash/qstash'

const qstash = new Client({ token: process.env.QSTASH_TOKEN })

await qstash.publishJSON({
  url: 'https://your-api.com/process',
  body: { orderId: '123' },
  retries: 3,
  delay: '10s',
})

Upstash vs Redis Cloud vs ElastiCache

Feature	Upstash	Redis Cloud	ElastiCache
Pricing	Per-request	Per-hour	Per-hour
Free tier	10K/day	30MB	None
Edge	REST API	TCP	TCP
Setup	30 sec	5 min	30 min

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