Using the AWS Pricing Calculator
Estimating cloud infrastructure costs is essential for budgeting and architectural planning. This aws pricing calculator allows you to forecast your monthly and annual expenses for Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources, specifically focusing on compute and storage, which typically make up the bulk of a cloud bill.
Whether you are running a single t3.micro for a personal blog or a fleet of m5.xlarge instances for an enterprise application, understanding the variables involved—such as uptime, storage requirements, and support levels—is key to preventing "bill shock" at the end of the month.
- Number of Instances
- The total quantity of virtual machines (EC2) you plan to run simultaneously.
- Usage Hours/Month
- For 24/7 operation, enter 730 hours (the average number of hours in a month). For development environments, you might enter 160 hours (8 hours/day, 20 days/month).
- Hourly Rate
- The On-Demand or Reserved Instance price provided by AWS for your specific region and instance size.
- EBS Storage (GB)
- The amount of Elastic Block Store capacity attached to your instances.
How the Calculation Works
The calculator uses the fundamental AWS pricing model for compute and storage. Compute costs are typically metered by the second (though shown as hourly), while storage is metered by GB-month. The core formula used by our aws pricing calculator is:
Monthly Cost = (Instances × Hours × Hourly Rate) + (Storage GB × Storage Rate)
Key factors that influence these numbers include:
- Region: Prices vary significantly between US East (N. Virginia) and more expensive regions like Sao Paulo or Tokyo.
- Instance Family: General purpose (T/M) vs. Compute optimized (C) vs. Memory optimized (R).
- Operating System: Linux instances are cheaper than Windows instances due to licensing fees.
- Storage Tier: General Purpose SSD (gp3) is usually more cost-effective than Provisioned IOPS (io2).
AWS Pricing Example
Scenario: A small web application running on two t3.medium instances in the us-east-1 region, running 24/7, with 50GB of gp3 storage each.
Step-by-step solution:
- Number of Instances: 2
- Hours per month: 730 (Standard for full month)
- Hourly Rate for t3.medium: $0.0416
- Compute Cost: 2 × 730 × 0.0416 = $60.74
- Total Storage: 100 GB (50GB per instance)
- Storage Rate (gp3): $0.08 per GB-month
- Storage Cost: 100 × 0.08 = $8.00
- Total Monthly Result: $68.74
- Total Annual Result: $824.88
Common AWS Pricing Questions
What is the difference between On-Demand and Reserved Instances?
On-Demand pricing is the standard "pay-as-you-go" rate with no long-term commitment. Reserved Instances (RIs) allow you to commit to a 1 or 3-year term in exchange for a significant discount (up to 72%) compared to On-Demand rates. Use the aws pricing calculator with the lower RI hourly rate to see your potential savings.
How does EBS storage pricing work?
AWS charges for the amount of storage you provision, regardless of how much data you actually write to the disk. If you provision a 100GB volume but only use 10GB of file space, you are still billed for 100GB. It is best practice to monitor volume utilization and resize volumes to save costs.
What about data transfer costs?
Data transfer "in" to AWS is generally free. However, data transfer "out" to the internet is billed per GB after the first 100GB. This is often the most difficult cost to predict and can vary wildly based on user traffic and content delivery patterns.
Does AWS offer a free tier?
Yes, the AWS Free Tier includes offers that expire after 12 months (like 750 hours of t2.micro or t3.micro) and some that are "always free" (like 1 million Lambda requests). Always check if your selected instance type qualifies for these offsets before finalizing your budget.