SimpleBackups vs AWS Backup: coverage, pricing model and setup work

The short answer on SimpleBackups vs AWS Backup

SimpleBackups vs AWS Backup comes down to where your databases live. AWS Backup protects AWS resources only and bills per GB. SimpleBackups connects to databases at any host and bills a flat plan. If every database is on Amazon RDS or Aurora, AWS Backup does more for less. If some are at Supabase, DigitalOcean, Hetzner or on your own servers, AWS Backup cannot reach them. All facts below come from AWS's and SimpleBackups' own pages, read on 3 October 2026.

Entry price: flat plan against per-GB billing

SimpleBackups has a free Basic plan (1 job, 1 GB database), then Lite at $49 per month on monthly billing or $39 per month on yearly billing, with 5 jobs and databases up to 5 GB. Plus is $99 with 20 jobs and databases up to 250 GB.

AWS Backup has no plan, no minimum fee and no setup charge. The pricing page says you pay for backup storage, restores, cross-Region transfer and audit evaluations. For the US East (N. Virginia) Region, the rates the pricing page loads are $0.095 per GB-month for Amazon RDS snapshot storage and $0.05 per GB-month for EBS and EFS warm storage. Restoring an RDS snapshot is listed as free. Restore testing costs $1.50 per recovery point tested.

Example: 100 GB of RDS snapshot storage is 100 x $0.095 = $9.50 per month. A 100 GB database on SimpleBackups is over Lite's 5 GB limit, so it needs either Lite with the $25 database-size add-on ($74 per month) or Plus at $99, on monthly billing, plus your own bucket fees. AWS's own worked example for a larger mixed setup, with cross-Region copies and audit checks, totals $68.97 per month.

SimpleBackups and AWS Backup compared on eight criteria

AWS documents that continuous backup lets you rewind an RDS instance to a chosen second within the last 35 days, up to roughly the latest five minutes. It is not supported for RDS Multi-AZ clusters. Snapshot backups can be kept for up to 100 years.

What a small team must configure in AWS Backup

AWS Backup is managed, but it is not zero-setup. The getting started guide and feature pages describe these pieces:

1. An administrator identity in IAM. AWS advises against using the root user.
2. Service opt-in under Settings, per account and per Region. Aurora, Neptune and DocumentDB must be opted in to be backed up.
3. A backup vault to hold recovery points.
4. A backup plan with rules: schedule, retention, optional move to cold storage, optional continuous backup.
5. Resource assignment, by resource type or by tags.
6. Optional copy rules to a second Region or account. Cross-account features need AWS Organizations.
7. Optional restore testing plan and Audit Manager controls, both billed.

In SimpleBackups the equivalent is one form per database: connection details, schedule, retention and storage.

One thing each does that the other cannot

AWS Backup only: scheduled restore testing. You define a testing plan, AWS restores chosen recovery points on a schedule, records how long each took, and deletes the test resources. Nothing in the SimpleBackups documentation does this.

SimpleBackups only: a portable file outside your cloud provider. A pg_dump file in a Backblaze or Cloudflare R2 bucket can be loaded into PostgreSQL anywhere, which matters if the AWS account itself is the thing you lose access to. An RDS snapshot is restored inside AWS. Provider backups and their limits explains why a second, independent copy is worth having.

Who each suits, and what switching involves

• All databases on RDS or Aurora, one AWS account: use AWS Backup with continuous backup. Add a logical dump only if you need a copy outside AWS.
• Databases at several providers, or self-managed PostgreSQL on a VPS: use SimpleBackups, or pgBackRest if you need point-in-time recovery.
• On AWS but required to hold an off-provider copy: run both. AWS Backup for fast recovery, SimpleBackups writing dumps to a non-AWS bucket.

Switching is additive, not a migration. The two do not share a format. Moving to SimpleBackups means opening network access from its workers to RDS and creating jobs. Moving to AWS Backup means building the vault and plan above. Keep the old backups until their retention expires, and time a restore from the new system first using the restore runbook.