Amazon Web Services pricing
How Amazon Web Services charges, what to know before you commit, and what you'd pay at your usage — next to what the alternatives would cost for the same thing.
How it charges
Checked 2026-10-03 on aws.amazon.com ↗ · USD, list pricesPure pay-as-you-go: Lambda at $0.20 per million requests and $0.0000166667 per GB-second after 1M requests and 400,000 GB-seconds free each month, about $16 a month per always-on t4g.small server, and $0.09 per GB out to the internet after 100 GB free.
- Free plan
- Yes
- Side project
- $16/mo Pay as you go (Lambda + EC2 t4g.small)
- Growing
- $17/mo Pay as you go (Lambda + EC2 t4g.small)
- Scaling
- $230/mo Pay as you go (Lambda + EC2 t4g.small)
What the model leaves out
An approximation of one common setup, not AWS's whole price list: Lambda for serverless requests and compute, EC2 for always-on servers, and data transfer out to the internet for bandwidth, all in us-east-1. Lambda x86 duration is $0.0000166667 per GB-second = $0.06 per GB-hour, and the monthly free 400,000 GB-seconds = 111.11 GB-hours (Arm is $0.048 per GB-hour); this holds at any memory size from 128 MB to 10 GB since you pay per GB-second. One instance is an on-demand t4g.small (2 vCPU burstable Arm, 2 GiB) at $0.0168/hour × 730 = $12.26 plus a public IPv4 address at $0.005/hour = $3.65, so $15.91 a month (from the EC2 on-demand and VPC pricing pages). Data transfer out is $0.09/GB up to 10 TB a month, then $0.085, $0.07 and $0.05 in higher tiers. Left out: EBS disk for the instance, API Gateway or a load balancer in front of Lambda/EC2 (Lambda function URLs are free), CloudFront, and the up-to-$200 Free Tier credits for new accounts. There are no per-seat fees.
- Public IPv4 addresses cost $0.005 an hour each, whether in use or idle — about $3.65 a month per server.
- The 100 GB of free data transfer out is global, shared across all AWS services and regions, not per service or region.
- T4g instances in Unlimited mode charge $0.04 per vCPU-hour for CPU credits when they burst above baseline for long.
- An EC2 instance bills per second from launch until it's stopped or terminated, whether or not it's serving traffic.
| Plan | Monthly fee | Requests per month | Data transfer out per month | Serverless function compute | Always-on app servers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pay as you go (Lambda + EC2 t4g.small) | None | 1 million requests includedthen $0.2 per million requests | 100 GB includedthen $0.09 per GB | 111.11 GB-hours includedthen $0.06 per GB-hour | $15.91 per server |
What you'd pay
Usage only some alternatives charge for
Cost as you grow
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