Amazon Web Services (AWS) Pricing 2026

AWS is pay-as-you-go, so cost depends entirely on what you use. A single t3.micro EC2 instance in us-east-1 costs $7.59/month; a t3.medium costs $30.37/month. Realistic production setups typically run $150–$3,000+/month depending on instance size, storage, data transfer, and managed services. The AWS Free Tier includes 750 hours/month of t3.micro compute free for the first 12 months.

The AWS Free Tier includes 750 hours/month of t2.micro or t3.micro EC2 instances for 12 months, 5 GB S3 storage for 12 months, 750 hours of RDS db.t2.micro for 12 months, and always-free allocations including 1 million Lambda requests/month, 25 GB DynamoDB storage, and over 30 other services with monthly usage limits.

AWS Enterprise Support has a minimum of $5,000/month (reduced from $15,000 in 2026). The actual charge is whichever is greater: the $5,000 minimum or a tiered percentage of your monthly AWS spend — 10% on the first $150K, 7% from $150K–$500K, 5% from $500K–$1M, and 3% above $1M. It includes a dedicated Technical Account Manager and 15-minute response times for critical issues.

AWS restructured its support plans in 2026. The current tiers are: Basic (free), Business Support+ (from $29/month), Enterprise Support (from $5,000/month), and Unified Operations (from $50,000/month). The legacy Developer, Business, and Enterprise On-Ramp plans are being phased out — Enterprise On-Ramp customers are being automatically upgraded to Enterprise Support during 2026, with full discontinuation by January 2027.

The biggest lever is Savings Plans or Reserved Instances — committing to 1 or 3 years of usage cuts costs by up to 72% vs on-demand. Spot Instances save up to 90% for interruptible workloads. Beyond that: right-size instances regularly, use auto-scaling, delete idle resources (especially EBS volumes and Elastic IPs), and watch data egress costs, which are among the most common sources of bill shock on AWS.

Data transfer out ($0.09/GB from us-east-1) is the top hidden cost — it can equal or exceed compute spend at scale. Other surprises include NAT Gateway charges ($0.045/hour plus data processing), EBS storage for stopped instances, idle Elastic IP addresses, CloudWatch detailed monitoring, and per-VPC-endpoint fees. Lambda can also be expensive above the free tier if used for sustained HTTP workloads instead of EC2.

Yes — multiple users report ongoing charges after deleting resources. Some services auto-regenerate resources (like VPCs and public IPs) or cannot be fully removed (like certain WAF distributions). AWS also sometimes auto-provisions services without explicit user action. If you see unexpected charges, audit your AWS Cost Explorer and check for orphaned Elastic IPs, unused load balancers, EBS snapshots, and WAF WebACLs.

When the 12-month Free Tier period expires, AWS automatically begins billing at On-Demand rates. Users report being converted from free to paid accounts and charged without clear notification. Set up AWS Budgets alerts before your free tier year ends to avoid bill shock. The always-free tier (Free Tier plan, $0/month) provides limited perpetual free usage for some services like Lambda (1M requests/month), S3 (5GB), and DynamoDB (25GB).

T3 instances appear cheap at baseline (t3.micro is $7.59/month), but 'unlimited' burst mode can make them dramatically more expensive. Burst credits cost $0.05/vCPU-hour — a t3.nano running at 100% CPU in unlimited mode costs $0.1052/hour, which is 5x the cost of a t3.small and 20x the baseline t3.nano rate. Disable unlimited mode or switch to a fixed-performance instance for CPU-intensive workloads.

AWS support access depends on your support plan. Without a paid plan (Business Support+ at $29/month or higher), billing support tickets are frequently left unassigned for days or weeks, with no phone or chat access. Multiple users report waiting 65+ days on unassigned billing tickets in 2026. AWS has largely replaced human support agents with AI chatbots for basic-tier customers. If you anticipate needing support, budget for at least Business Support+.

Historically, AWS has not raised prices on existing services — they have instead periodically reduced prices and added new lower-cost options. However, they do add new charges over time (S3 GET/PUT fees, Lambda Init charges) and new instance types may not offer pure price-per-performance improvements over older ones. The practical effect is proxy pricing increases through new mandatory service charges.

For high-volume data workloads, AWS EBS storage is significantly more expensive than bare-metal alternatives. Community analysis found EBS st1 storage at $45/TB/month (us-east) is 32x more expensive than equivalent Hetzner bare-metal storage ($1.36/TB/month). For 130TB, that's $70,200/year on AWS vs. $2,160/year on Hetzner. However, EBS provides distributed redundancy and instant scaling that bare-metal does not.