AWS Pricing Estimator

Stop the sticker shock. Estimate your monthly AWS bill for EC2 instances, S3 storage, and Data Transfer. Updated for 2026 On-Demand pricing.

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AWS Pricing Guide 2026: EC2, S3 & Costs

📅 Updated: March 2026 ☁️ Platform: Amazon Web Services 💲 Model: On-Demand

Table of Contents

EC2 Pricing Explained (On-Demand)

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) allows you to rent virtual servers. With On-Demand pricing, you pay for compute capacity by the second, with no long-term commitment. This is the most flexible but most expensive option.

Price is determined by:

  1. Instance Type: The CPU, RAM, and Storage capacity.
  2. Region: Where the server is physically located.
  3. OS: Linux is cheaper than Windows (due to licensing).

Instance Types: T3 vs M5 vs C5

Choosing the right family is crucial for performance and cost.

  • General Purpose (T3, M5, M6g): Balanced resources. T3 instances are "burstable" (cheapest), ideal for websites that aren't constantly busy. M5 instances provide consistent performance.
  • Compute Optimized (C5, C6g): High performance processors. Ideal for batch processing, media transcoding, and scientific modeling.
  • Memory Optimized (R5, R6g, X1): High RAM. Ideal for databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and in-memory caches (Redis).

S3 Storage & Data Transfer

S3 costs are often underestimated because they consist of three parts:

  1. Storage: What you pay to keep the files there (e.g., $0.023 per GB).
  2. Requests: You pay a tiny amount for every PUT, COPY, POST, and GET request.
  3. Data Transfer Out: The hidden killer. Transferring data into AWS is free. Transferring data out to the internet costs money (approx $0.09 per GB after the first 100GB).

Why Regions Matter

Costs vary significantly by region due to local taxes, electricity, and real estate costs.

  • Cheapest Regions: typically US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon).
  • Premium Regions: South America (São Paulo) and parts of Asia can be 50%+ more expensive.

Always host your resources in the region closest to your users for speed, but consider cost if latency isn't critical.

How to Save (Spot & Savings Plans)

Never run workloads 24/7 on On-Demand pricing if you can avoid it.

  • Savings Plans (Compute): Commit to a specific $ / hour usage for 1 or 3 years. Saves up to 66%.
  • Spot Instances: Bid on unused AWS capacity. Can save up to 90%, but AWS can terminate your instance with 2 minutes' notice. Great for fault-tolerant background tasks.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the AWS Free Tier? +
AWS offers a Free Tier for 12 months for new accounts. This typically includes 750 hours per month of a `t2.micro` or `t3.micro` EC2 instance and 5GB of S3 storage. Be careful: if you leave the instance running and exceed the 750 hours (e.g., by running two instances), you will be charged.
Does stopping an instance stop charges? +
Mostly. When you "Stop" an EC2 instance, you stop paying for the compute hours. However, you still pay for the EBS storage (the virtual hard drive) attached to it. To stop all charges, you must "Terminate" the instance.