Amazon Web Services Pricing — Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, RDS/Aurora & Egress Costs (2026)
Amazon Web Services is the broadest catalog in this comparison and the most complex to price: instance families, Savings Plans, Spot markets, and separate object-storage request meters all land on the same bill. Everything below is computed from AWS published list rates by the same engine as the live estimator.
- Graviton3/4 arm64 processors offer up to 20% lower price/performance.
- Savings Plans apply flexibly across EC2, Fargate, and Lambda.
What a AWS architecture costs
Four reference architectures, priced for Amazon Web Services alone by the same engine that powers the live estimator — list prices in USD, us-east-1 baseline, on-demand unless noted.
SaaS Starter MVP
Ideal for early-stage startups and production web apps with up to 25k monthly active users.
- Virtual Machines / Compute
- $49.06/mo
- Object & Block Storage
- $11.54/mo
- Managed Relational Database
- $61.14/mo
- Networking & Data Egress
- $155.08/mo
High-Traffic E-Commerce
Engineered for high concurrent checkouts, product catalogs, and intensive flash sales.
- Virtual Machines / Compute
- $370.99/mo
- Object & Block Storage
- $46.21/mo
- Managed Relational Database
- $414.88/mo
- Networking & Data Egress
- $760.15/mo
Enterprise Microservices (K8s)
Multi-service containerized architecture with managed Kubernetes clusters and service mesh.
- Object & Block Storage
- $115.52/mo
- Managed Relational Database
- $829.77/mo
- Networking & Data Egress
- $1131.42/mo
- Managed Kubernetes
- $857.90/mo
AI / ML Inference & Pipeline
Compute and memory-optimized instances designed for low-latency LLM serving and vector retrieval.
- Virtual Machines / Compute
- $1249.76/mo
- Object & Block Storage
- $184.80/mo
- Managed Relational Database
- $714.77/mo
- Networking & Data Egress
- $1366.35/mo
Amazon EC2 instance pricing
Every published shape in the catalog, priced at 730 hours/month in USD list rates.
| Instance | Shape | On-demand | 1-year reserved | 3-year reserved | Spot / preemptible |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
t4g.small General Purpose (t4g/m6g/m6i) | 2 vCPU / 2 GB | $12.26/mo | $7.74/mo | $5.18/mo | $3.65/mo |
t4g.medium General Purpose (t4g/m6g/m6i) | 2 vCPU / 4 GB | $24.53/mo | $15.48/mo | $10.29/mo | $7.37/mo |
t4g.xlarge General Purpose (t4g/m6g/m6i) | 4 vCPU / 16 GB | $98.11/mo | $61.83/mo | $41.17/mo | $29.42/mo |
m6i.2xlarge General Purpose (m6i) | 8 vCPU / 32 GB | $280.32/mo | $175.93/mo | $117.53/mo | $83.95/mo |
c6i.4xlarge Compute Optimized (c6i) | 16 vCPU / 32 GB | $496.40/mo | $312.44/mo | $208.05/mo | $148.92/mo |
r6i.4xlarge Memory Optimized (r6i) | 16 vCPU / 128 GB | $735.84/mo | $463.55/mo | $308.79/mo | $220.46/mo |
m6i.8xlarge High Capacity | 32 vCPU / 128 GB | $1121.28/mo | $705.91/mo | $470.85/mo | $336.53/mo |
Amazon S3 storage tiers
| Hot / standard | $0.0230/GB-mo $23.00 per TB-month · $0.0004/10k reads · $0.0050/10k writes |
|---|---|
| Cool / infrequent | $0.0125/GB-mo $12.50 per TB-month · $0.0010/10k reads · $0.0100/10k writes |
| Cold | $0.0040/GB-mo $4.00 per TB-month · $0.0050/10k reads · $0.0130/10k writes |
| Archive | $0.0010/GB-mo $0.99 per TB-month · $0.0500/10k reads · $0.0300/10k writes |
RDS/Aurora pricing
| db.t4g.medium (2 vCPU / 4 GB) | PostgreSQL $49.64/mo · MySQL $49.64/mo · SQL Server $129.94/mo Storage $0.1150/GB-mo · multi-AZ multiplies the instance rate by 2× |
|---|---|
| db.m6g.xlarge (4 vCPU / 16 GB) | PostgreSQL $230.68/mo · MySQL $230.68/mo · SQL Server $551.88/mo Storage $0.1150/GB-mo · multi-AZ multiplies the instance rate by 2× |
| db.m6g.2xlarge (8 vCPU / 32 GB) | PostgreSQL $461.36/mo · MySQL $461.36/mo · SQL Server $1103.76/mo Storage $0.1150/GB-mo · multi-AZ multiplies the instance rate by 2× |
| db.r6g.2xlarge (8 vCPU / 64 GB) | PostgreSQL $619.04/mo · MySQL $619.04/mo · SQL Server $1261.44/mo Storage $0.1150/GB-mo · multi-AZ multiplies the instance rate by 2× |
Networking & egress
| Internet egress | $0.0900/GB (first 10 TB) Then $0.0850/GB up to 40 TB. No standing free allowance. |
|---|---|
| Load balancer | $16.43/mo |
| Static IPv4 address | $3.65/mo |
Amazon EKS
| Control plane (first cluster) | $73.00/mo $0.100/hr per cluster, charged from the first cluster. |
|---|
Where AWS ranks
- Entry-level compute: #5 of 10 ($24.53/mo (t4g.medium))
- Egress at 20 TB/month: #8 of 10 ($1792.00/mo)
Full ranked tables live in the cost guides.
Lowering a AWS bill
AWS Graviton & Savings
Migrate general-purpose workloads to AWS Graviton3/4 processors for up to 20% better price/performance compared to standard x86 instances.
Combine with Compute Savings Plans for cross-region flexibility.
- Use Spot or Graviton node pools for non-critical stateless microservices.
- Route traffic via CloudFront to cut egress costs by 30-50%.
Compare AWS with other providers
Cost guides featuring AWS
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Amazon Web Services pricing — frequently asked questions
Is AWS expensive compared with other cloud providers?
AWS prices at the hyperscaler end of the catalog: for comparable general-purpose instances it sits alongside Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, above the developer clouds and the challengers. What AWS sells on top of the raw rate is breadth — the widest instance and managed-service catalog in this comparison — plus the deepest discount machinery, so the on-demand rate is rarely the rate a committed customer actually pays.
What is the cheapest way to run a workload on AWS?
Three levers do most of the work. Move general-purpose workloads to Graviton arm64 instances, which offer up to 20% better price/performance than the equivalent x86 shapes. Cover steady-state capacity with Compute Savings Plans, which apply flexibly across EC2, Fargate, and Lambda rather than locking you to one instance family. And route outbound traffic through CloudFront, because AWS meters internet egress from the first gigabyte and a CDN in front of it is usually the largest single saving available.
Who is AWS the right choice for?
Teams that will genuinely consume the breadth: multiple managed database engines, specialized compute (GPU, inference, memory-optimized), a global region footprint, and enterprise support and compliance programs. If your workload is compute, object storage, one managed Postgres and a Kubernetes control plane, you are paying a premium for catalog you may not use — the comparison tables and workload totals below make that premium explicit.
What does the cheapest comparable instance cost on AWS?
For a 4 vCPU / 16 GB Linux instance at 730 hours a month on demand, the engine matches Amazon EC2 to t4g.xlarge at $98.11/month. Instance shapes differ between providers, so the matched shape matters as much as the price — the compute table below lists every published shape with its reserved and spot rates.
How does AWS charge for data transfer?
Internet egress is metered from the first gigabyte — there is no standing free transfer allowance. Load balancers bill at $16.43/month and static IPv4 addresses at $3.65/month in this catalog, both metered hourly.
What storage tiers and managed database engines does AWS offer?
Object storage is available in 4 tiers (hot, cool, cold, archive) — see the storage table for per-GB rates. Managed databases cover POSTGRES, MYSQL, SQL SERVER. The managed Kubernetes control plane bills $73/month per cluster.
Provenance for every figure on this page is listed on the methodology page.