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Serverless HTTP message queue and scheduler · by Upstash

Upstash QStash

HTTP-based message queue and scheduler that delivers messages to your endpoints with retries, delays, cron and dead-letter queue, billed per message.

Visit upstash.com ↗ Alternatives Free tier EU region
Upstash QStash homepage
§1

Overview

QStash is a push-based queue: instead of workers polling, you publish a message addressed to a URL and QStash calls that URL, retrying on failure and moving undeliverable messages to a dead-letter queue. It adds delays, cron schedules, URL groups for fan-out, FIFO queues, flow control (rate and parallelism), callbacks and deduplication. Because delivery is plain HTTP it works from Vercel, Cloudflare Workers and other serverless hosts.

The free plan allows 1,000 messages a day with 1 MB messages and 10 schedules. Pay as you go costs $1 per 100,000 messages with 50 GB of bandwidth included and no daily cap. Fixed 1M ($180/month) and Fixed 10M ($420/month) plans raise message size, bandwidth, schedule counts and retention.

Upstash Workflow is an SDK on top of QStash for multi-step durable workflows. Each context.run, sleep or waitForEvent is one message, context.call is two, and retries count as new messages, so a workflow run costs several messages.

QStash runs in two independent regions, EU (Frankfurt, the default) and US East, each with its own tokens and billing. There is no self-hosted version beyond a local development server started by the SDK.

§2

Pricing and plans

Free tier

1,000 messages a day, 50 GB bandwidth, 1 MB messages, 7-day max delay, 10 active schedules, 10 queues, 3-day logs and DLQ

At the limit Not stated The vendor does not say what happens at the limit, or we have not found it yet.

Plan Price What you get
Free $0 1,000 messages/day, 1 MB messages, 15-minute response duration
Pay as You Go $1 per 100K messages Unlimited messages/day, 10 MB messages, 1-year delay, 2-hour response, 50 GB bandwidth then $0.05/GB
Fixed 1M $180/mo 1M messages/day, 1 TB bandwidth, 50 MB messages, 10,000 schedules
Fixed 10M $420/mo 10M messages/day, 5 TB bandwidth, 50,000 schedules
Enterprise Custom 100M+ messages/day, SAML SSO, dedicated support

One delivery attempt to one endpoint is one billed message: topic publishes bill once per subscriber and each schedule trigger bills once. The pricing page headline says retries are free, but its own FAQ says each retry counts as an additional message; the FAQ is the more detailed statement. On pay as you go, active schedules beyond 1,000 cost $0.01 each. Messages-per-day and bandwidth caps are soft: sustained overuse leads to contact from Upstash and eventually 429 errors; the page does not say how the free daily cap is enforced. Uptime SLA, encryption at rest, SOC 2 report and Datadog/Prometheus need the Prod Pack add-on, whose price was not shown. EU and US regions are billed separately.

Source: upstash.com/pricing/qstash · prices as published, excluding tax.

§3

What it does

Push delivery with retries
Messages are POSTed to your endpoint and retried on error; failures land in a dead-letter queue.
Schedules and delays
Cron schedules and per-message delays up to 7 days on Free and 1 year on pay as you go.
Queues and flow control
FIFO queues plus rate-per-second and parallelism limits so your endpoint is not overloaded.
Fan-out
URL groups publish one message to many endpoints, billed once per endpoint.
Upstash Workflow
Durable multi-step workflows with sleep, waitForEvent and long HTTP calls, billed in QStash messages.
EU and US regions
Independent regions in eu-central-1 and us-east-1 with a console migration tool.
§4

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • Works from edge and serverless runtimes with no worker process
  • Pay per message with nothing charged when idle
  • EU region is the default
  • Delays up to a year and built-in cron

Limitations

  • Free plan is capped at 1,000 messages a day and 10 schedules
  • Your endpoint must be publicly reachable over HTTP
  • HTTP response duration is capped at 15 minutes on Free and 2 hours on pay as you go
  • SLA, encryption at rest and the SOC 2 report require the Prod Pack add-on
  • Retries and each workflow step are billed as messages
§5

Who it suits

Good for

  • Serverless apps that need delayed or retried webhooks
  • Cron jobs for apps hosted on Vercel or Cloudflare
  • Fan-out of events to several services

Look elsewhere if

  • Workloads that must run inside a private network with no public endpoint
  • Very high message volumes where a self-run queue costs less
§6

Alternatives to Upstash QStash

Tool From Free option Stages
Windmill Open-source job orchestrator, workflow engine and internal-tool platform
$10/mo Free tier
Solid Queue Database-backed Active Job backend for Rails
— Open source
Hatchet Postgres-backed task queue and durable workflow engine
Usage-based Free tier
Faktory Language-agnostic background job server
$299/mo Open source
Cloudflare Queues Managed message queue for Cloudflare Workers
Usage-based Free tier
Cloudflare Workflows Durable workflow engine on Cloudflare Workers
Usage-based Free tier

All background jobs, queues and workflows →

§7

Questions

Is QStash free?

Yes. The free plan allows 1,000 messages a day, 10 active schedules and 1 MB messages.

How much does QStash cost?

Pay as you go is $1 per 100,000 messages with 50 GB of bandwidth included; fixed plans are $180 and $420 a month.

Are QStash retries billed?

According to the pricing FAQ, each delivery attempt, including a retry, counts as one message.

Does QStash have an EU region?

Yes. QStash runs in an EU region (eu-central-1), which is the default, and a separate US East region.

What is the difference between QStash and Upstash Workflow?

QStash delivers single messages; Upstash Workflow is an SDK built on QStash for multi-step durable workflows, billed by the QStash messages each step uses.

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