AWS Pricing Calculator 2025 Guide

So you’ve got a brilliant idea for an AWS app. You’re all set to get cracking on it, but your boss wants to know what it is going to cost. The problem is, who wants to spend their entire Wednesday afternoon buried in pricing tables, evaluating countless cost factors just to end up with a shaky AWS cost estimate that’s probably wrong anyway?

Enter: the AWS Pricing Calculator. This is your trusty sidekick to estimate project costs in minutes. This is the Swiss army knife of AWS budgeting tools, with support for most services, cloud providers and configuration settings. It’s a handy tool regardless of whether you’re a seasoned Amazon Web Services veteran or just dipping your toes into the cloud computing world.

The AWS Pricing Calculator may appear daunting at first. But in this article, we’ve got your back. We’ll walk you through step-by-step instructions for estimating costs, dealing with real-world use cases involving some fan-favorite AWS cloud services, including Lambda, Simple Queue Service (SQS), and DynamoDB (DDB). By the end, you’ll be able to take any app idea you have and just let the AWS Pricing Calculator crunch out all the cost numbers for you and make informed decisions.

What is the AWS Pricing Calculator?

Glad you asked! Let’s break it down.

High-Level Overview

The AWS Pricing Calculator is a one-stop shop for estimating project costs within the AWS ecosystem. With support for approximately 150 AWS services (and counting), it covers just about any common AWS setup. For each service, you can specify exact configuration settings to see how each one impacts final service costs.

The best part is that you don’t even need an AWS account to access the AWS Pricing Calculator. Just hop on over to the AWS Pricing Calculator, choose Create estimate, and you’ll be on your way.

Helpful Features To Optimize The AWS Cost Calculator

The AWS Cost Calculator is more than a tool that adds two and two together. You can also define groups to help provide a cost estimate into logical sets. For instance, you might define groups based on business classifications (i.e. by team or by cost center), or based on technical details (i.e. by storage costs vs. compute, or by infrastructure region). Groups can even be nested.

The AWS calculator also includes potential AWS Support costs, often neglected in most estimates. AWS makes this as quick and easy as choosing a support plan that best aligns with your needs.

As you add groups and AWS services to your estimate, they’ll appear in the table above. Each group or service will have its own payment options listed (upfront and monthly costs), and the Estimate summary above will aggregate the AWS total cost.

Finally, you can also export your estimate as a .csv or .pdf file for sharing.

Creating Estimates Using the AWS Pricing Calculator

Our estimate in the previous screenshot looks a little bare. Let’s fix that now!

To illustrate the AWS Pricing Calculator in action, let’s use a simple but practical example showcasing one of the use cases you might see in many other serverless apps. For our use case, suppose we want an AWS app to track order history for our online store. We’ll need three AWS resources: an SQS queue, a Lambda function, and a DynamoDB table.

The SQS queue will contain messages, each of which represents an online order. The Lambda function listens to this queue, and triggers whenever it receives a new message. It then writes important metadata from the message to the DynamoDB table, effectively acting as our data store for all order history.

Now that we have this simple architecture, let’s also make the following assumptions:

  • We get 36,000 orders per hour (i.e., 10 orders per second). Business is booming!
  • We’ll set up this app in the US East (N. Virginia) region.

Next, we need to come up with one estimate per service. So let’s dive right into the AWS Pricing Calculator by clicking Create estimate.

Configure the Amazon SQS Cost Estimate

Upon starting a new estimate, you’ll be met with the Add service screen. First, let’s make sure we choose the right AWS region–US East (N. Virginia). We’ll do Amazon SQS first, so simply search “sqs” in the search box to find it.

Choose Configure. This brings you to the Configure service screen, where you enter in details about your expected SQS usage:

  • Standard queue requests: 26 (Since we expect 36,000 requests per hour, multiply this by 24 to get requests per day, then multiply by another 30 to get requests per month, rounding up to 26 million to be safe.)

Given that we’re not going to do any data transfers in or out of the region, we can leave the entire next section blank. So, it looks like our total monthly SQS cost is going to be $10. Choose Save and add service to continue.

Configure the AWS Lambda Cost Estimate

SQS was pretty easy since there aren’t that many parameters to configure. Let’s move to Lambda next. This has the potential to be a bit more complicated, as there are a lot more settings to play around with. If you want a more in-depth explanation, check out our Complete AWS Lambda Pricing and Optimization Guide.

On Lambda’s Configure service screen, there are a couple more subsections. The first one, Service settings, is relatively straightforward:

  • Architecture: Arm (Lambda functions tend to perform better on this setting.)
  • Number of requests: 36000 per hour
  • Duration of each request (in ms): 100
  • Amount of memory allocated: 128 MB
  • Amount of ephemeral storage allocated: 512 MB

After all this, our service settings results in a monthly estimated cost of $5.06.

The next section illustrates why you’ll often need to have some prerequisite AWS knowledge to make best use of the Pricing Calculator. It concerns Provisioned Concurrency.

But how much provisioned concurrency will we need? In best case, our function has a concurrency of 1 (10 requests per second multiplied by 0.1 seconds per request). In the worst case, let’s suppose that you want to guarantee that your application is always able to handle a surge of 50 simultaneous requests:

  • Architecture: Arm
  • Concurrency: 50
  • Time for which Provisioned Concurrency is enabled: 730
  • Number of requests for Provisioned Concurrency: 36000 per hour
  • Duration of each provisioned request (in ms): 100
  • Amount of memory allocated: 128 MB

The provisioned concurrency settings result in a monthly estimated cost of $62.57.

In total, our Lambda estimate comes out to $67.63 per month.

Configure the AWS Cost Estimate for DynamoDB

Last but not least, we come to DynamoDB. The first things we want to choose in the Configure service pane are the features we want to create a quick estimate for. We want to highlight DynamoDB on-demand capacity instead.

The page changes dynamically based on our selected feature(s). Table Class is straightforward: best practice says to just choose Standard. The first meaningful section is Data storage, where we’ll use:

  • Data storage size: 1 GB
  • Average item size (all attributes): 12 Bytes

Data store backups make up just a small portion of our DynamoDB cost, at $0.25 per month.

On-demand write settings: 36000 writes per hour, estimated cost is $32.85 per month.

This brings our DynamoDB total to $33.10 per month.

Viewing the Overall Estimate

Returning to the overall estimate, you’ll see the three individual service estimates aggregated in the Estimate summary box at the top.

Can the AWS Pricing Calculator Help You Optimize AWS Cost?

The AWS Pricing Calculator has no built-in functionality to help you identify areas of focus for AWS cost optimization. However, it allows you to experiment with many different configuration settings and scenarios, helping you save here and there by generating a quick estimate.

How Accurate is the AWS Pricing Calculator?

The AWS Pricing Calculator is pretty darn accurate. If your actual usage matches your projected AWS usage, expect your final AWS bill to align closely with the cost estimates. Treat the AWS Pricing Calculator as just a powerful estimation tool, not a crystal ball.

Get Started with the AWS Pricing Calculator

The AWS Pricing Calculator is a go-to tool for estimating AWS project expenses, exploring different configurations, and helping with cost optimization. So if you have a new project on the horizon, head to the AWS Pricing Calculator and start creating your estimate.