Amazon Web Services (AWS) Pricing: Plans & Cost Guide 2026
AWS Free Tier starts free and includes 750 EC2 hours, while alternatives like Kinsta start at $35/mo.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) plans and pricing
AWS Free Tier
Ideal for new users to explore AWS services without upfront costs
Pay-as-you-go (On-Demand)
Offers maximum flexibility with no long-term commitments
Savings Plans
Provides significant discounts over On-Demand pricing in exchange for a 1-year or 3-year commitment to a consistent amount of compute usage.
Reserved Instances
Offers a discount compared to On-Demand pricing by committing to a specific instance configuration for a 1-year or 3-year term.
Spot Instances
Leverages unused EC2 capacity for up to 90% savings compared to On-Demand prices
Private Pricing
Amazon Web Services (AWS) pricing: the quick answer
AWS has no flat sticker price: it bills pay-as-you-go on usage as of July 8, 2026, across 6 plan types with a free tier. The Free Tier covers 750 monthly hours of EC2 micro instances and 5 GB S3. Past that it meters. On-Demand pays full rate, Savings Plans and Reserved Instances trade a 1 or 3-year commit for up to 75 percent off, and Spot reaches 90 percent off if you can eat interruptions. An On-Demand t3.micro in us-east-1 runs $0.0104/hour. You pay for what you run.
- AWS Free TierFree
- Pay-as-you-go (On-Demand)Custom
- Savings PlansCustom
- Reserved InstancesCustom
- Spot InstancesCustom
- Private PricingCustom
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is free to start, against a $11.50/mo median across 20 cloud hosting tools we track.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Hidden Costs & Pitfalls
AWS pricing is a per-resource rate card, not a plan fee. What you pay comes down to instance family, storage class, and how much you commit up front.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) pricing, read against its live plans and category
Positioning
AWS operates on a completely different paradigm than the category median of $11.50/mo. Instead of flat-rate plans, it relies on a Pay-as-you-go (On-Demand) model billed by the hour, second, gigabyte, or request, alongside a Free Tier offering $100 to $200 in initial credits. For teams that can commit to 1-year or 3-year terms, Savings Plans and Reserved Instances slash costs by up to 72% and 75% respectively, while Spot Instances offer up to 90% off for interruptible workloads. It is highly worth the investment for scaling enterprises, but smaller projects will find the pricing model unnecessarily complex compared to simple flat-rate hosts.
Cost drivers
- 1Overage charges when exceeding the strict usage limits of the 30+ always-free services on the Free Tier
- 2Sudden cost spikes from unmonitored resource consumption, API requests, or data transfers
- 3Long-term financial lock-in when committing to 1-year or 3-year Savings Plans or Reserved Instances to get advertised discounts
Watch-outs
The biggest risk with AWS is the lack of hard spending caps, which leads to runaway bills and unexpected invoices that catch developers off guard. Users frequently report extreme anxiety over complex billing dashboards and the inability to easily predict monthly costs.
Strengths
Even the free tier offers unmatched breadth of 200+ fully-featured services - strong value at no cost.
- Unmatched breadth of 200+ fully-featured services
- Most extensive global cloud infrastructure and availability zones
- Deepest enterprise adoption and third-party ecosystem support
What users say
“it seems potentially super cheap like most people paying”
“I got one of those $1.000 credits... but it already run out”
Editor’s take
Startups and developers testing concepts should stick strictly to the AWS Free Tier, while scaling enterprises with predictable workloads should commit to Savings Plans or the Enterprise Discount Program to maximize discounts. If you want to avoid billing surprises and prefer predictable, flat-rate monthly pricing, host your applications with DigitalOcean starting closer to the category median.
Oleh KemFounder & Lead AnalystAmazon Web Services (AWS) price history
Cheaper Cloud Hosting tools
Frequently asked questions
Sources & verification
| Source | What was checked | Last checked |
|---|---|---|
| Official Pricing Page | Source of verified tiers | July 8, 2026 |
| Official Website | Official vendor website | — |
| G2 | G2 verified user reviews · 4.5/5 · 80 reviews | — |
| Capterra | Capterra verified user reviews · 4.6/5 | — |
| TrustRadius | TrustRadius verified reviews | — |
| PeerSpot | PeerSpot enterprise peer reviews | — |
| StackShare | StackShare developer community | — |
Every fact on this Amazon Web Services (AWS) pricing page is tied to a named source and a verification date. Freshness-sensitive figures trace to the sources above; verify against the vendor before relying on them.
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