AWS offers you a simple, pay-as-you-go pricing approach for over 50 cloud services. With AWS you pay only for the services you need, for as long as you use them and with no long-term contracts.
AWS pricing is based on each individual service so you only pay for what you use, and you don't have to worry about dependencies, complex licensing or termination fees.
AWS's flexible pricing options are designed to help your business succeed. Whether you are a large established enterprise or a vibrant new startup, AWS’s pricing is designed to help you access the cloud at your own pace and pay only for the capacity you use.
AWS also gives you the option to pay in local currencies, giving your organization a single pricing framework around the world. With AWS you can access services globally and adopting a consistent pricing model.
Purchase AWS services as you need them and only for the period when you plan to use them. AWS pricing has no upfront fees, termination penalties, or long-term contracts.
AWS helps you reduce or eliminate capital intensive investments such as hardware and facilities while significantly curtailing overhead costs in management and maintenance.
AWS empowers you to change capacity requirements, reserve to pay less, and participate in the Spot market. This drives efficiencies by shifting from a forecast-model to a demand-driven model.
AWS supports local currency payments that help you budget according to local market needs. With AWS services pricing models are consistent across the world removing complexities from regional or local pricing.
AWS pricing helps you reduce costs in multiple ways. With AWS's pay-as-you-go model, you can plan for growth or increased demands from seasonality. AWS gives you the option to budget according to your business needs.
With AWS's pay-as-you-go model you can have assurance that capacity will be available to meet all of your users' needs without having to over-provision or run the risk of not meeting demand.
Estimate your costs savings by using our TCO Calculator.
AWS's pricing philosophy is driven by a virtuous cycle: AWS's value based pricing reduces the barrier to entry into the cloud. This in return means more AWS customers that drive more AWS usage; more AWS usage drives greater infrastructure and R&D spend, which gives AWS significant economies of scale - thereby lowering infrastructure cost and allowing AWS to pass savings and continued innovation on to customers.
AWS is constantly focused on improving our operational efficiencies and reducing our data center infrastructure costs. These optimizations, and AWS growing economies of scale, result in passing savings back to you in the form of lower prices.
AWS pricing is based on 4 basic principles: pay-as-you-go, pay less per-unit by using more, pay less when you reserve, and pay less as AWS grows. This approach gives you the flexibility to match our pricing options to your needs and benefiting from AWS's growth and scale.
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AWS requires no minimum commitments or long-term contracts. With AWS you replace your upfront capital expense with low variable costs and pay only for what you use. In essence, you convert your capital expense into variable expense.
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With AWS you save more as you grow bigger. For services such as storage and data transfer, pricing is tiered. The more you use, the less you pay per GB. For compute, you get volume discounts up to 10% when you reserve more.
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For certain services like Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS, you can invest in reserved capacity. In that case, you pay a low upfront fee and get a significantly discounted hourly rate, which results in overall savings of up to 60% over equivalent On-Demand capacity.
Learn more about Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances »
There are three main components for how you pay for AWS: compute, storage, and data transfer out. These principles vary slightly depending on the AWS product you are using. However, fundamentally these are the core drivers that have the greatest impact on your AWS costs.
- Pay for compute time by the hour
- Multiple combinations of OS, cores, RAM, local storage
- On-Demand, Dedicated, Reserved, and Spot Instances
- Volume Discounts
- Pay per GB
- Cheaper storage at lower redundancy
- Pay-for-performance option for block storage
- Tiered pricing
- Pay per GB for data out, no charge for inbound data
- Minimal charge for data transfer within the same region
- Bandwidth aggregated across all services
- Tiered pricing
This whitepaper covers how AWS pricing works and includes discussions on topics such as lowering costs and the benefits of tiered pricing. The paper also details On-Demand pricing for instantly available resources, using reserved capacity (Reserved Instances) for lowering costs, and name-your-price options for non-time-dependent workloads on the Spot Instance market.
To help new AWS customers get started in the cloud, AWS provides a free usage tier. The Free Tier can be used for anything you want to run in the cloud: launch new applications, test existing applications in the cloud, or simply gain hands-on experience with AWS.
Learn more about the AWS Free Tier »
