AWS Cost Calculator
What will a real AWS deployment cost per month, not just one instance on its own? This AWS cost calculator prices the four services most bills are actually made of, EC2, S3, RDS and Lambda, in one screen, and returns an itemized monthly total with per-day and annual views. The EC2 line comes with an On-Demand, Reserved and Spot comparison, and the RDS line goes further than most estimators bother to go: Reserved database pricing, backup storage overages, provisioned IOPS and the Extended Support surcharge for legacy engines are all priced as separate lines.
The worked example used throughout is a small web application: 2 t3.medium instances running around the clock, 100 GB of S3 storage, a small MySQL database and 2 million Lambda requests a month. It totals $80.23 per month. If your question is narrower, EC2 alone or data transfer alone, the dedicated calculators linked further down price those in more depth; this page is the whole-bill view.
Planning estimate based on US East reference rates in the tool’s price tables. Actual AWS pricing varies by region and changes over time. Confirm a budget that matters with the vendor’s official pricing tool before committing to it.
Quick Answer
Key takeaways
- Single-service math lies by omission. Real AWS bills are sums, and the trade-offs only appear when compute, storage, database and serverless sit in one estimate.
- EC2 drives most small bills: 76% of the worked example. The pricing model comparison under every result prices the same fleet on Reserved and Spot before you commit.
- The most dangerous line in this calculator is RDS Extended Support: a legacy engine version on the smallest database class adds $292.00 per month, twenty times the database’s own compute charge.
- Estimates use US East reference rates. Regions, support plans and request fees move real bills, and the limits section below names exactly what is and is not inside this number.
- Quick Answer
- How to build a whole AWS estimate in one pass
- How each service line is priced
- Worked example: a small web application at $80.23 a month
- The RDS charges most estimators skip
- What this estimate leaves out
- This quick estimate, or a full vendor pricing workup?
- What this calculator covers, and why each part matters
- Frequently asked questions
- Add This Calculator to Your Website
- References
How to build a whole AWS estimate in one pass
Work top to bottom and zero out anything you will not run. For EC2, pick the instance type, the count, the hours per month (730 means the fleet never sleeps) and a pricing model. For S3, enter average gigabytes stored, the storage class and expected transfer out. For RDS, pick the engine and class, add storage, decide on Multi-AZ, and be honest about the engine version, because that answer carries the Extended Support charge. For Lambda, enter monthly requests in millions, average duration and memory. Press Calculate AWS Cost and read the total, the four service lines, the RDS breakdown and the EC2 model comparison together.
If you already know one service dominates your thinking, go deeper where it counts. The aws ec2 cost calculator prices EC2 alone across 20 instance types, four operating systems and all five pricing models, including Reserved upfront payments and breakeven. Come back here when you want the whole bill again.
How each service line is priced
Every line in the result is a short multiplication, and knowing them lets you predict what a change will do before you touch the inputs.
The rate tables inside the tool match AWS’s published prices for the headline items: a t3.medium at $0.0416 per hour On-Demand, S3 Standard at $0.023 per GB-month and Lambda at $0.20 per million requests are the figures on the Amazon EC2 On-Demand pricing page and its S3 and Lambda counterparts. Where the tool simplifies, it says so on the input itself, and the limits section below collects every simplification in one place.
Worked example: a small web application at $80.23 a month
The calculator is pre-filled with a typical small deployment: a pair of web servers, object storage for uploads, a small managed database and a serverless helper for jobs like image resizing and email triggers.
| Service | Configuration | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| EC2 | 2 x t3.medium, On-Demand, 730 hrs: 2 x $0.0416 x 730 | $60.74 |
| S3 | 100 GB Standard ($2.30) + 100 GB transfer inside the 100 GB free allowance ($0.00) | $2.30 |
| RDS | db.t3.micro MySQL ($0.017 x 730 = $12.41) + 20 GB storage ($2.30) | $14.71 |
| Lambda | 2M requests ($0.40) + duration 2M x 0.5s x 0.125 GB ($2.08) | $2.48 |
| Total | $2.64 per day, $962.76 per year | $80.23 |
Two changes show how sensitive the total is to decisions people treat as footnotes. Turn on Multi-AZ and the RDS line becomes $27.12, taking the total to $92.64. Raise Lambda memory from 128 MB to 512 MB and the Lambda line becomes $8.73, because duration is billed per GB-second and memory is the multiplier. Neither change touches the application code at all.
The RDS charges most estimators skip
Four RDS lines separate this calculator from the field, and the fourth is the one that blindsides real teams. Reserved RDS pricing cuts the compute rate by about 29% for a one-year term. Backup storage is free up to the size of your provisioned storage, then bills at $0.095 per GB-month, which punishes long retention on small databases. Provisioned IOPS above the 3,000 gp3 baseline cost $0.02 each per month, so a database provisioned at 6,000 IOPS carries a quiet $60 monthly line. Extended Support is the worst: databases still on MySQL 5.7 or PostgreSQL 11 era versions pay $0.20 per vCPU-hour. On the smallest class in this tool that is 2 x $0.20 x 730 = $292.00 a month, against $12.41 of actual database compute. Upgrading the engine version is unglamorous work that can cut a small database bill by 95%.
Transfer deserves the same suspicion. This tool prices S3 transfer out on the schedule AWS publishes: the first 100 GB each month is free, aggregated across services, then the per-GB rate steps down in tiers as volume grows, so at volume the tiers matter more than the headline rate. The aws data transfer pricing calculator models those tiers band by band, along with CloudFront delivery, inter-region traffic, NAT Gateway processing and VPC peering.
What this estimate leaves out
An honest estimate names its edges. This one excludes AWS Support plans, which start as a percentage of the bill and matter at scale. It excludes S3 request fees, load balancers, Route 53, Secrets Manager and the long tail of small services that add a few dollars each. It prices one region’s rates: most other regions run higher than US East, some by 10 to 20% on the same configuration. And it holds usage flat for the month, so spiky workloads that burst for a weekend will land lower than a flat 730-hour assumption suggests. Use the number for architecture decisions and budget ranges, then confirm a final figure in the official tool before finance signs anything.
This quick estimate, or a full vendor pricing workup?
Both tools earn their place, at different moments in a project.
This calculator
- Four core services on one screen, a first budget number in under a minute.
- RDS extras itemized: backup overage, provisioned IOPS, Extended Support.
- Cost-driver insight and EC2 model comparison built into every result.
- No account, no saved-estimate workflow, nothing to configure before pricing.
A full vendor pricing workup
- Every AWS service, current regional rates, shareable estimate links.
- The right place to confirm a final budget before committing spend.
- Takes longer: services are added one at a time through a configuration workflow.
- Extended Support and backup overages can be missed if a step is skipped.
Teams pricing a move to the cloud often sanity-check the same architecture against the other major provider before deciding. The azure cost calculator gives the same style of whole-estimate view for Azure, so the two totals can sit side by side.
What this calculator covers, and why each part matters
This calculator prices a whole small stack in one pass — EC2, S3, RDS, and Lambda on one screen — with the database surcharges itemized and the cost driver identified, so a first budget number comes out in under a minute.
- Four services, one total. Each run shows the total alongside the four service lines, so you can see at once which service drives the bill.
- The RDS charges itemized. Backup storage above the free tier, provisioned IOPS above the baseline, and Extended Support for legacy engine versions each appear as their own line, with the breakdown under every result.
- Cost-driver insight in every result. The worked example shows EC2 driving about 76% of the bill, and the EC2 model comparison under every result prices the same fleet on Reserved and Spot before you commit.
- Scope stated honestly. Estimates use US East reference rates, and the limits section names exactly what is outside the number — support plans, request fees, load balancers, and the other small services — so the total is read as a planning figure.
Frequently asked questions
The worked example in this guide, two small web servers, 100 GB of object storage, a small MySQL database and 2 million serverless requests, totals $80.23 per month at US East On-Demand rates. Real small applications land anywhere from about $30 for a single small instance with a tiny database to several hundred dollars once Multi-AZ databases, larger instances and steady data transfer are added. Enter your own configuration for a figure that matches your stack.
No. This is an independent quick estimator that prices EC2, S3, RDS and Lambda from published AWS rates on one screen. The vendor’s official pricing tool covers every service with current regional pricing and shareable estimates, and it is the right place to confirm a final budget. This page is built for the earlier question: roughly what will this architecture cost, and which service drives it?
Because the instance is only part of the RDS bill. Storage bills separately per GB-month, Multi-AZ doubles the instance portion for the standby, backups beyond the size of your provisioned storage bill per GB, provisioned IOPS above the gp3 baseline bill per IOPS, and legacy engine versions add Extended Support at $0.20 per vCPU-hour. The breakdown under every result shows which of these is in your number.
When a database engine version ages out of standard support, AWS keeps it running under Extended Support and charges $0.20 per vCPU-hour for the privilege. On a 2 vCPU instance running all month that is $292.00, which can exceed the database compute charge itself by twenty times, as the worked example shows. Upgrading to a current engine version removes the charge entirely, which makes it the single highest-value maintenance task on older RDS fleets.
It doubles the instance portion, not the whole line. In the worked example the database compute goes from $12.41 to $24.82 while storage stays at $2.30, so the RDS line rises from $14.71 to $27.12 rather than $29.42. Extended Support, when it applies, also doubles because the standby runs the same legacy version.
Two parts: $0.20 per million requests, plus a duration charge of $0.0000166667 per GB-second, where GB-seconds are requests multiplied by runtime in seconds and memory in gigabytes. The worked example pays $0.40 for 2 million requests and $2.08 for duration at 500 ms and 128 MB. Because memory multiplies the duration charge, raising memory from 128 MB to 512 MB takes the same workload from $2.48 to $8.73 in this tool.
At the S3 Standard rate of $0.023 per GB-month used here, 100 GB costs $2.30 per month for the storage itself. In the worked example the S3 line totals $2.30 because its 100 GB of data transfer out falls inside the 100 GB monthly free allowance AWS publishes, so the transfer part costs $0.00. Storage class changes the storage part sharply: the same 100 GB costs $1.25 in Standard-IA and about $0.10 in Glacier Deep Archive, before retrieval fees.
Support plans, S3 request fees, load balancers, DNS, monitoring and other small services are excluded, as are regional price differences: the tool uses US East reference rates throughout. Data transfer follows the published tiered schedule with the 100 GB monthly free allowance; for route-by-route transfer pricing beyond this S3 line, use the dedicated data transfer calculator. Treat the total as a planning figure with a clear scope, not a bill prediction.
Add This Calculator to Your Website
References
- Amazon Web Services, “Amazon EC2 On-Demand Pricing” – the instance hourly rates and data transfer schedule the EC2 line is built from. AWS: EC2 On-Demand Pricing. Accessed October 2026.
- Amazon Web Services, “Amazon S3 Pricing” – storage class rates per GB-month, including Standard-IA and the Glacier tiers. AWS: Amazon S3 Pricing. Accessed October 2026.
- Amazon Web Services, “Amazon RDS Pricing” – instance, storage, backup and Extended Support pricing for managed databases. AWS: Amazon RDS Pricing. Accessed October 2026.
- Amazon Web Services, “AWS Lambda Pricing” – the $0.20 per million requests and per GB-second duration rates. AWS: Lambda Pricing. Accessed October 2026.
- Amazon Web Services, “AWS pricing” – the vendor’s official estimator for confirming a final budget across all services and regions. AWS pricing. Accessed October 2026.
- Amazon Web Services, “AWS Free Tier” – the free allowances, including 100 GB of data transfer out per month aggregated across services. AWS: Free Tier. Accessed October 2026.