338 articles on aws — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
Direct Connect bills a port-hour fee by connection speed plus data transfer out at rates well below internet egress. For high, steady traffic to AWS it pays back the port fee; for low volume it does not. Here is the model.
Site-to-Site VPN bills about $0.05 per connection-hour (roughly $36/month) plus standard data transfer out. It is a cheap, quick way to connect on-premises to AWS over the internet. Here is the model and when to prefer Direct Connect.
Storage Gateway charges for the AWS storage it writes to (S3, EBS snapshots, or virtual tapes), requests, and data transfer, plus a per-gateway fee on some types. The bulk of the bill is the backing storage. Here is the model.
QuickSight bills per author (a monthly subscription) and per reader (session-based with a monthly cap), plus SPICE in-memory capacity beyond the included allowance. Matching author and reader licensing to real usage is the main lever. Here is the model.
Bedrock bills per 1,000 input and output tokens on-demand, with rates varying by model, plus a provisioned-throughput option (per model-unit-hour) for steady high volume. Prompt and output length drive on-demand cost. Here is how to control it.
Inf2 (Inferentia) and Trn1 (Trainium) instances are AWS custom ML accelerators priced per instance-hour, often far cheaper per inference or training step than GPU instances. The catch is model compatibility. Here is when they cut cost.
Timestream bills writes per million, storage in a fast memory tier (per GB-hour) and a cheap magnetic tier (per GB-month), and queries per GB scanned. Tuning retention between tiers and scanning less are the levers. Here is the model.
Since February 2024, AWS charges about $0.005 per hour (roughly $3.60/month) for every public IPv4 address, whether attached or idle. Idle Elastic IPs and sprawling public IPs add up fast. Here is what changed and how to cut it.
EBS snapshots bill about $0.05 per GB-month for changed blocks (they are incremental), or about $0.0125 in the Archive tier for rarely-restored snapshots. Snapshot sprawl from unmanaged schedules is the usual culprit. Here is how to control it.
Simple Email Service charges roughly $0.10 per 1,000 emails sent, plus a small charge for attachments and inbound, and standard data transfer. It is one of the cheapest ways to send email at scale. Here is the breakdown and the few gotchas.
Cognito bills by monthly active users (MAU) with a free tier, and separately for advanced security features. Cost scales with your user base, not requests. Here is how the MAU model works and how to keep it predictable.
CloudWatch alarms cost about $0.10 each per month (standard), $0.30 for high-resolution or anomaly-detection, and $0.50 for composite. A few are trivial; thousands generated per-resource across a fleet add up. Here is how to keep it sane.
ElastiCache Serverless bills per GB-hour of data stored and per ElastiCache Processing Unit (ECPU) consumed, scaling to your workload with no nodes to size. It suits spiky caches; steady ones can be cheaper on nodes. Here is how it prices.
Route 53 bills per hosted zone and per query, so cost scales with traffic. Cloudflare offers DNS on flat plans (including a free tier) with unlimited queries. Here is how the two models compare and when each wins.
DocumentDB bills like Aurora: instance hours per node, $0.10 per GB-month of storage, and $0.20 per million I/O requests. On a busy cluster the I/O line often rivals compute. Here is the full breakdown and where to cut.
Neptune charges per instance hour (or per NCU on Serverless), $0.10 per GB-month of storage, and $0.20 per million I/O. Serverless scales to your load; provisioned is cheaper when load is steady. Here is how to choose and control the bill.
Glue bills about $0.44 per DPU-hour for jobs and crawlers, with a minimum billing per run, plus Data Catalog storage and request fees. Fewer, right-sized DPUs and less frequent crawling are the main levers. Here is the breakdown.
Athena charges $5 per TB of data scanned, so cost is decided by how much data each query reads, not how often you query. Partitioning, columnar formats, and compression cut scans by an order of magnitude. Here is how.
Firehose charges about $0.029 per GB ingested (first 500 TB/month), with extra for format conversion and VPC delivery. Cost tracks data volume, so batching and compression before ingest are the main levers. Here is the breakdown.
Elastic Beanstalk adds no charge of its own. You pay for the EC2, load balancer, RDS, and storage it provisions. That means every EC2 cost lever applies, and the environment type quietly decides the bill. Here is what to watch.
App Runner bills active compute (vCPU and memory) while serving requests and a lower provisioned charge for memory when idle. That idle floor matters for low-traffic services. Here is how the two rates work and when App Runner is worth it.
Lightsail sells fixed monthly bundles that include an instance, storage, and transfer allowance, which is predictable and often cheaper for small workloads. EC2 is pay-as-you-go and scales further. Here is when each wins.
Amplify Hosting bills build minutes, stored artifacts, data served, and server-side rendering compute. For a static site it is cheap; SSR and heavy traffic are where cost grows. Here is the breakdown and where to cut.
Elastic Container Registry charges $0.10 per GB-month of image storage, trivial for most teams. The real cost is data transfer: cross-region and internet pulls add up, while pulls to ECS or EKS in the same region are free. Here is the full breakdown.