Apache Airflow
Indicative from-price range
Indicative from-price range for self-hosting Apache Airflow on 1 server: about $24 to $112 per month (USD), as of 2026-10-19, for the reference workload (Scheduled DAGs: 100; Peak running tasks: 50; Executor mode: LocalExecutor; Schedule density: moderate-triggers). From-price by provider, each the cheapest server in that provider's own shortlist: $24 on DigitalOcean (basic-2vcpu-4gb, 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, fra1); $49 on Google Cloud (e2-standard-2, 2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, us-central1); $63 on Amazon Web Services (c9g.large, 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, us-east-1); $64 on OVHcloud (rise-1, 6 vCPU, 32 GB RAM, eu-west); $66 on Microsoft Azure (D2as_v7, 2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, eastus); $66 on Hetzner (AX41, 6 vCPU, 64 GB RAM, eu-central); $262 on Servers.com (dl-01, 8 vCPU, 64 GB RAM, eu-west).
Reference workload
- Scheduled DAGs: 100
- Peak running tasks: 50
- Executor mode: LocalExecutor
- Schedule density: moderate-triggers
Methodology
This range is generated automatically from public provider price lists. It has not been reviewed by a person, it is not a quote, and it may differ from the total the calculator chooses for your own workload with its AI step. Method: the calculator's offer shortlist for the reference workload (the same ranking it builds before the AI step, up to 12 offers across providers; 12 here) is priced at its monthly list price in USD. The low end is the cheapest of the per-provider from-prices below and the high end is the median server of the combined shortlist, each multiplied by 1, the smallest baseline topology (scheduler-webserver). The from-price for each provider applies the same method to that provider's own shortlist (the calculator's ranking restricted to that provider), so it is the cheapest server that ranking offers there, not a recommendation. Prices are taken from the price snapshot dated 2026-10-19; prices quoted in EUR are converted with the ECB reference rate dated 2026-10-19. Servers with fewer than 2 vCPU or less than 4 GB RAM are not priced. Only server rental list prices for the product's own servers are counted: dependencies, licences, support, traffic charges, taxes and setup fees are not included.
Price sources
- Amazon Web Services: https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AmazonEC2/current/us-east-1/index.json
- DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets
- Google Cloud: https://cloudbilling.googleapis.com/v1/services/6F81-5844-456A/skus
- Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/_resources/app/data/app/live_data_en_EUR.json
- Microsoft Azure: https://prices.azure.com/api/retail/prices
- OVHcloud: https://eu.api.ovh.com/1.0/order/catalog/public/eco?ovhSubsidiary=FR
- Servers.com: https://www.servers.com/products/scalable-bare-metal
Size Apache Airflow for your own workloadMarkdown versionFor AI agents (llms.txt)
Apache Airflow is an open-source platform for authoring, scheduling, and monitoring data pipelines expressed as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of tasks. It originated at Airbnb and is now a top-level Apache Software Foundation project used to orchestrate ETL, ML, and infrastructure automation workflows.
What gets deployed with it
- PostgreSQL HA Cluster — required Airflow metadata database dependency. Stores DAG state, task instances, logs, and variables.
Baseline topologies
| Topology | Minimum nodes | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| scheduler-webserver | 1 | airflow-scheduler, airflow-webserver |
| scheduler-webserver-workers | 3 | airflow-scheduler, airflow-webserver, airflow-worker |
What drives the cost
- Scheduled DAGs
- DAGs that are actively scheduled and contribute to scheduler and metadata DB load.
- Peak running tasks
- Maximum task instances expected to run at the same time. Primary driver for worker capacity.
Where it runs
bare_metal, dedicated, cloud_vm
Size Apache Airflow and get a cost estimate