AWS Pricing Fundamentals
AWS Pricing Principles
AWS pricing follows three fundamental characteristics:
- Pay as you go — pay for exactly what you use, when you use it.
- Pay less when you reserve — Reserved Instances and Savings Plans offer significant discounts in exchange for a commitment.
- Pay less with volume-based discounts — the more you use, the less you pay per unit (e.g., S3 tiered pricing).
AWS Free Tier
Three types of free tier offers:
- Always Free — never expires (e.g., AWS Lambda: 1M requests/month).
- 12 Months Free — available for 12 months from sign-up (e.g., EC2 t2.micro 750 hrs/month, S3 5 GB).
- Trials — short-term free trials for specific services.
Cost Management Tools
AWS Cost Explorer
Visualise, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. View historical data going back 13 months and forecast future costs.
AWS Budgets
Set custom budgets to track costs and usage and receive alerts when you exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your thresholds. Supports cost, usage, reservation, and Savings Plans budgets.
AWS Pricing Calculator
Estimate the cost of your AWS use cases before you deploy. Create cost estimates for architectures or individual services.
AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR)
The most detailed available set of AWS cost and usage data. Delivered to S3 as CSV files.
AWS Organisations & Consolidated Billing
Combine usage across accounts in your organisation to qualify for volume pricing discounts. One bill for all accounts. Master account pays for all member accounts.
AWS Support Plans
Support Plan Tiers
| Plan | Price | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | Free | All accounts; documentation, whitepapers, forums |
| Developer | $29+/mo | Experimenting; business hours email support |
| Business | $100+/mo | Production workloads; 24/7 phone, chat, email |
| Enterprise On-Ramp | $5,500+/mo | Business-critical workloads; TAM pool access |
| Enterprise | $15,000+/mo | Mission-critical; dedicated Technical Account Manager |