Data transfer between Availability Zones
Traffic between AZs costs $0.01/GB each way. A highly-available architecture with 500 GB/day of inter-AZ traffic adds $300+/month that never appears in the standard calculator estimate.
AWS Cost Calculator
Estimate your AWS infrastructure costs for EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, CloudFront and EKS — without signing into AWS.
1Select a service tab — EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, etc.
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2Enable it and adjust the parameters to match your setup
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3The total updates automatically on the right
EC2 Instances
$140.16/moYour estimate● Live
$140.16
per mo
≈ $1,681.92 / year
- EC2 Instances$140.16
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Approximate us-east-1 On-Demand rates as of 2025. Excludes support plans, data transfer between AZs, NAT Gateway, and Marketplace add-ons.
This free AWS price calculator covers the six services that account for 80–90% of a typical startup or scaleup's monthly AWS bill. Configure each one and see a real-time estimate.
What the AWS pricing calculator estimates
EC2 — Compute
Choose from 16 instance types across general-purpose (t3, m5), compute-optimised (c5) and memory-optimised (r5) families. Compare On-Demand, Reserved 1yr, Reserved 3yr and Spot pricing side by side.
RDS — Managed Database
Estimate MySQL and PostgreSQL costs across 8 instance types. Toggle Multi-AZ deployment on or off and add provisioned gp2 storage. Multi-AZ pricing is the most commonly underestimated RDS line item.
S3 — Object Storage
Calculate storage costs across Standard, Standard-IA and Glacier Instant Retrieval tiers. Includes PUT/GET request pricing and data transfer out — the part most AWS pricing estimators forget.
Lambda — Serverless
Enter monthly request volume, average function duration and memory allocation. The AWS free tier (1M requests + 400K GB-seconds/month) is automatically deducted from the estimate.
CloudFront — CDN
Estimate CloudFront costs based on monthly data transfer and HTTPS request volume. Applies first-10TB regional pricing tier ($0.0085/GB). Inter-origin transfer not included.
EKS — Kubernetes
The only AWS pricing estimator that shows EKS total cost correctly: $0.10/hr cluster fee per cluster plus EC2 worker node costs. Most tools only show the cluster fee and miss the node cost entirely.
Get a reviewed AWS estimate
The official AWS Pricing Calculator shows you what you configure — not what you'll actually pay. These six cost categories are consistently missing from estimates and consistently show up on invoices.
Hidden AWS costs the official calculator misses
NAT Gateway
NAT Gateway costs $0.045/hr per gateway plus $0.045/GB of data processed. A 3-AZ deployment with moderate traffic easily runs $200–$400/month — and most teams don't include it in estimates.
AWS Support plan
Business Support starts at $100/month or 10% of spend (whichever is higher). On a $10K/month bill, support adds $1,000. On $100K+, the percentage tier kicks in. Rarely included in initial estimates.
EBS snapshots and IOPS
Provisioned IOPS (io1/io2) costs $0.065–$0.125/IOPS/month on top of storage. EBS snapshots at $0.05/GB/month accumulate if not lifecycle-managed. Critical for database and high-throughput workloads.
Elastic IP idle charges
Every Elastic IP not attached to a running instance costs $0.005/hr (~$3.60/month). Forgotten EIPs from stopped or terminated instances accumulate silently and are missed in nearly every estimate.
Marketplace add-ons and license fees
WAF rule groups, third-party security tools, and OS licenses (Windows, RHEL) from AWS Marketplace carry their own per-hour or per-unit charges on top of underlying EC2 and service costs.
Choosing the wrong purchase model is the most expensive AWS pricing mistake. Here is what each model means and when to use it.
AWS purchase models — which one saves the most?
On-Demand — pay as you go
Full list price, no commitment. Use for unpredictable workloads, development environments, or traffic spikes you can't forecast. Always the baseline price your AWS pricing estimator should show you first.
Reserved Instances — commit and save 38–57%
1-year or 3-year commitment in exchange for up to 57% off On-Demand rates. Right choice for steady-state production workloads running 24/7. Savings Plans are a more flexible alternative that applies across instance families.
Spot Instances — up to 90% off, interruptible
AWS sells unused capacity at 60–90% discount. Your instance can be reclaimed with 2 minutes notice. Ideal for batch processing, CI runners, stateless workers, and ML training jobs that can tolerate interruption.
Savings Plans — flexibility with commitment
Commit to a consistent spend ($/hr) for 1 or 3 years. Applies automatically across EC2, Lambda, and Fargate regardless of region, OS, or instance family. Simpler to manage than Reserved Instances for growing teams.
The official AWS Pricing Calculator (calculator.aws) is comprehensive — but it's built to show you AWS pricing, not to help you reduce it. An independent AWS cost estimator gives you a different kind of answer.
Why use an independent AWS cost calculator?
No upsell built into the estimate
The official tool shows you all 200+ services in detail. That's useful — but it's also designed to make adding services feel easy. An independent estimate focuses on what you actually need.
Surfaces the costs official estimates skip
NAT Gateway, inter-AZ transfer, EBS IOPS, idle Elastic IPs and support plans are rarely included in the default AWS pricing estimator output. This calculator flags them explicitly.
Correct Kubernetes / EKS pricing
Most AWS pricing estimators either omit EKS or only show the cluster control plane fee ($0.10/hr). The real EKS cost includes EC2 worker node charges, which typically represent 80–95% of the total EKS bill.
Compare purchase models side by side
Switch between On-Demand, Reserved 1yr, Reserved 3yr and Spot in real time. See exactly what each commitment level saves before you make a 1–3 year purchase decision.
Frequently asked questions
The AWS Pricing Calculator (also called the AWS price calculator or AWS cost calculator) is the official free tool from Amazon Web Services for estimating the cost of AWS infrastructure before you deploy it. It covers 200+ services and lets you configure instance types, regions, usage patterns and purchase models to generate a monthly or annual cost estimate. You don't need an AWS account to use it. The authenticated version (available when logged in) can import your existing usage data and model Reserved Instance or Savings Plan commitments against your actual workload.
An AWS pricing calculator is accurate for the services you configure — but the final bill almost always includes costs the estimate didn't account for. Common gaps: data transfer between Availability Zones ($0.01/GB each way), NAT Gateway processing fees, EBS snapshot accumulation, idle Elastic IP charges, Marketplace license fees, and AWS Support plan costs. A $10,000/month estimate can easily become $12,000–$14,000 when these are included. This calculator includes a disclaimer for each service about what isn't covered.
An AWS pricing estimator is for planning — it estimates what infrastructure will cost before you build it, based on your configuration inputs. AWS Cost Explorer is for analysis — it shows what you actually spent on real AWS usage, broken down by service, region, account or tag. Use a pricing estimator during architecture and procurement decisions. Use Cost Explorer for ongoing spend analysis, Reserved Instance utilisation tracking, and identifying cost-saving opportunities in your running environment.
The most effective AWS cost reduction levers, in order of typical impact: (1) Right-size EC2 and RDS instances — most teams over-provision by 30–50% during initial setup. (2) Purchase Reserved Instances or Savings Plans for steady-state workloads — saves 38–57% vs On-Demand. (3) Use Spot Instances for fault-tolerant workloads (CI/CD, batch, ML training) — saves 60–90%. (4) Delete unused resources: idle EIPs, unattached EBS volumes, old snapshots. (5) Optimise data transfer — architect to minimise inter-AZ and inter-region traffic. (6) Set S3 lifecycle policies to move data to cheaper storage classes automatically.
AWS EKS total cost has two parts: the cluster control plane fee ($0.10/hr per cluster, roughly $73/month) and EC2 worker node costs (the actual instances running your pods). The worker node cost is almost always the larger component. A cluster with 3 m5.large nodes runs an additional $210/month in EC2 costs on top of the $73 cluster fee — making the true monthly cost $283, not $73. Managed node groups and Fargate for EKS add their own per-pod pricing on top.
Yes — calculator.aws is completely free. You don't need an AWS account to use the public version. The authenticated version (which requires login) adds the ability to import your actual usage data and model commitment purchases against real usage patterns. This calculator is also free. Binerals provides it as a planning resource for teams evaluating AWS infrastructure costs — if you need a more detailed estimate or AWS architecture review, you can request one via the contact form below.
EC2 compute is the largest AWS cost driver for most workloads, typically accounting for 40–60% of total spend. RDS managed databases are usually the second-largest line item. Data transfer (often underestimated) frequently appears in the top three. For containerised workloads, EKS control plane plus EC2 worker nodes can combine to represent 50–70% of total infrastructure cost. Lambda and CloudFront are typically lower-cost services for most architectures, but Lambda can become significant at high request volumes without proper function memory tuning.
The official AWS Pricing Calculator covers 200+ services in depth and is the most comprehensive tool available. This calculator focuses on the six services that drive the majority of spending for most teams — EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, CloudFront and EKS — with cleaner inputs and explicit notes on what each estimate excludes. It's intended as a fast planning tool, not a replacement for the official calculator. For complex multi-service architectures, we recommend using both: this calculator for a quick sanity check and calculator.aws for a detailed line-item breakdown.