AWS Fault Injection Service cost: per action-minute of experiments

Quick answer

AWS Fault Injection Service bills about $0.10 per action-minute, an action-minute being one fault-injection action running for one minute. Cost scales with how many actions an experiment runs and for how long, so a typical experiment costs cents to a few dollars. It is inexpensive relative to the resilience it validates, and the main lever is simply not running longer or more actions than the test needs.

AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) runs controlled chaos-engineering experiments, deliberately injecting faults (terminating instances, adding latency, throttling APIs) to test how your system responds. Its pricing is per action-minute, so cost tracks the duration and number of fault-injection actions, and it is cheap.

Per action-minute

Dimension	Cost
Action-minute	~$0.10 (one action running one minute)

An action-minute is one fault-injection action running for one minute. An experiment with three actions running for ten minutes is thirty action-minutes, about $3. So most experiments cost cents to a few dollars. Note that the faults themselves may have downstream effects (an experiment that scales resources as part of the test incurs those resource costs), but the FIS charge itself is small.

The value versus the cost

FIS is inexpensive relative to what it validates: whether your system survives failures without a costly outage. Chaos experiments that reveal a resilience gap before it causes a production incident are worth far more than their action-minute cost. So FIS is rarely a cost concern; it is a small spend that de-risks expensive failures.

Controlling FIS cost

Run experiments for the duration the test needs rather than longer, scope experiments to the actions that validate your hypothesis, and be aware of downstream resource costs that the injected faults trigger (a failover that spins up capacity). Because the per-action-minute charge is small, the FIS bill is negligible for most; the discipline is running purposeful experiments rather than open-ended ones. It pairs with the broader resilience-versus-cost thinking in high-availability decisions: spend to validate that the resilience you paid for actually works.

FAQ

How is AWS Fault Injection Service priced?

About $0.10 per action-minute, where an action-minute is one fault-injection action running for one minute. Cost scales with the number of actions in an experiment and how long they run, so a typical experiment costs cents to a few dollars. The downstream effects of the faults may incur separate resource costs.

Is AWS FIS expensive?

No. At about $0.10 per action-minute, most chaos experiments cost cents to a few dollars, negligible relative to the resilience they validate. Revealing a resilience gap before it causes a production outage is worth far more than the small action-minute cost, so FIS is rarely a cost concern.

How do I control FIS cost?

Run experiments for the duration the test needs rather than longer, scope experiments to the actions that validate your hypothesis, and account for downstream resource costs the injected faults trigger (such as a failover spinning up capacity). The per-action-minute charge is small, so purposeful, bounded experiments keep it negligible.

Do the faults FIS injects cost extra?

The FIS action-minute charge is separate from any downstream costs the faults cause. An experiment that triggers a failover which spins up additional capacity incurs those resource costs, and one that adds latency does not. So account for the experiment's downstream effects, though the FIS charge itself is small.

Is chaos engineering worth the cost?

Generally yes, because FIS is cheap (cents to dollars per experiment) and validates whether your system survives failures without a costly outage. Finding a resilience gap in a controlled experiment, rather than a production incident, is worth far more than the small cost. It de-risks the expensive failures that resilience spending is meant to prevent.

Does C3X estimate FIS cost?

FIS cost is driven by action-minutes, a usage input tied to experiment design. C3X prices the surrounding infrastructure, including resources that experiments may affect, and you model experiment actions and duration to estimate the fault-injection charges.

What to do next

Estimate the infrastructure your resilience tests exercise before you run them. C3X reads your Terraform and prices your resources against a live catalog. Start with the quickstart.