AWS Pricing Calculator: How to Use It (With an Example), the In-Console Calculator With Your Discounts, Why Estimates Run Low, Public Share Links That Expire, and the API

The AWS Pricing Calculator is AWS's free tool for estimating what services will cost before you build. There are actually two: the public calculator at calculator.aws, which needs no account, and the in-console Pricing Calculator in Billing and Cost Management, which can apply your own discounts, Savings Plans and Reserved Instances. To use the public one, choose Create estimate, pick a service, choose a Region, enter your usage and choose Save and add service; the summary shows upfront, monthly and 12-month totals. Two things surprise almost everyone. First, a shared estimate link is public: estimates are saved to AWS's public servers, and anyone with the link can open your architecture and numbers. Second, those links expire after one year, and editing an estimate does not update the old link. And estimates tend to run low, because they include only what you enter: no tax, and no data transfer, public IPv4 addresses or support plan unless you add them. This guide walks through both calculators with a worked example, the in-console extras ($2 per bill estimate after five a month), the API, and how far to trust the numbers.

Jake wanted to know what moving his booking system off the old office PC would cost on AWS. Ethan opened the calculator, typed in a few services, and got $37 a month. "That's it?" Jake asked. "That's what I told it," Ethan said. "Which is not the same as what we'll use. Give me ten minutes to tell it the rest."

New to AWS pricing? Almost everything on AWS is billed by usage: per hour of a server, per gigabyte stored, per million requests. That makes costs flexible and also hard to predict, which is the job of the calculator. It does not watch your account or bill you; it multiplies the usage you describe by AWS's published prices. Our guides to S3 storage classes and Reserved Instances vs Savings Plans vs Spot cover the biggest pricing decisions you will make inside it.

What is the AWS Pricing Calculator? (There are two)

AWS runs two separate calculators that share a name. They suit different moments:

Both use AWS's published prices, and both give estimates, not quotes. If the calculator and a service's pricing page ever disagree, the pricing page wins. Estimates exclude tax, and they include only the usage you describe. "So it's a very honest calculator," Jake said, "that only knows what you tell it." "Exactly," said Ethan, "which is why the list matters more than the tool."

How to use the AWS Pricing Calculator, step by step

1. Open calculator.aws and choose Create estimate.
2. Find a service on the Add service page (type "EC2", "S3", "Lambda" and so on) and choose Configure.
3. Add a description, such as "booking API". You will thank yourself when the estimate has fifteen lines.
4. Choose the Region. Prices differ between Regions, sometimes by 20 percent or more for the same thing.
5. Enter the usage. Many services offer a quick estimate with a few fields and an advanced estimate with every dimension. Choose Show calculations to see exactly how each number is built.
6. Choose Save and add service, then add the next service. Repeat until the whole architecture is in.
7. Choose View summary to see upfront, monthly and 12-month totals, per service and per group.
8. Add support if you will buy a support plan (Add support on the My Estimate page), because Business and Enterprise support are priced as a share of your monthly AWS spend.
9. Export or share the estimate (below), and write down the link if you share it.

Work in the same units your bill will use: hours per month (the calculator treats a month as 730 hours), gigabytes per month, millions of requests. When in doubt, estimate high on data transfer and logs; those are the lines people forget.

AWS Pricing Calculator example: a small serverless app

Here is the kind of estimate Ethan built for Jake's booking system, using US East (N. Virginia) prices for October 2026, before any free tier:

That was Jake's "$37". It is a correct estimate of what was entered, and it is not the bill. Ethan's ten-minute additions were the things the first pass skipped: the logs Lambda writes to CloudWatch, data sent out to customers' phones, the domain name and DNS queries, the backup copy of the bucket, and a small allowance for growth. Switching the Lambda functions to Arm (Graviton) would cut the duration line to $0.0000133334 per GB-second, about $16.67 instead of $20.83, which is the kind of comparison the calculator makes easy: copy the line, change one setting, compare.

EC2 estimates: the defaults that change your number

EC2 is where most estimates go wrong, because its page has many defaults:

• Tenancy defaults to Shared Instances, the normal choice. Dedicated tenancy costs much more.
• Operating system defaults to Linux. Windows and SQL Server licenses are included in the hourly price when you choose them, and they change the number a lot.
• Pricing strategy: On-Demand, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances or Spot. Expected utilization applies only to On-Demand, so describe part-time servers there.
• Payment option for commitments defaults to No Upfront, the lowest start-up cost; All Upfront gives the biggest discount but a large first payment.
• EBS volumes, detailed monitoring, data transfer and Elastic IPs are separate sections on the same page. Leave them empty and they cost nothing in the estimate, which is not how the bill works.

The public IPv4 trap. The calculator's own EC2 help still describes one Elastic IP on a running instance as free. That changed in February 2024: AWS now charges $0.005 per hour for every public IPv4 address, in use or idle, which is $3.65 per address for a 730-hour month (US East price, October 2026). A fleet of 20 public instances is $73 a month that an estimate built on the old rule leaves out. Make sure your estimate has a line for public IPv4 addresses; if the EC2 page does not show one, add it as a custom cost. Our VPC endpoint pricing guide covers the networking lines that often go missing too.

Why AWS Pricing Calculator estimates come out low

The calculator is accurate about what you enter and silent about what you do not. The usual gaps, in order of how often they bite:

1. Data transfer out to the internet: usually the biggest surprise on a first bill. Estimate what users download each month and add it.
2. Public IPv4 addresses: $3.65 each per month, for every load balancer, NAT gateway and public instance address.
3. NAT gateways: an hourly charge plus a per-gigabyte processing charge for traffic from private subnets.
4. Logs and monitoring: CloudWatch Logs ingestion and storage grow with traffic.
5. Backups and snapshots: EBS snapshots, RDS backups beyond the free allowance, S3 versions.
6. Support plan: add it explicitly if you will buy one.
7. Tax: never included.
8. Growth: an estimate is one month at one usage level. Model the next year with a second group at the higher usage.

Ethan's rule for Jake: "Add 20 percent for the things you forgot, then go and find what they are." By the end of the ten minutes the estimate was $52, and the first real bill came in at $49.

The Free Tier: why small estimates can look too high

The calculator does not account for the AWS Free Tier at all. Every line is priced from the first unit, which matters most for small projects: a test environment that the Free Tier mostly covers can show tens of dollars in the calculator and cost almost nothing on the bill. That is deliberate, because Free Tier allowances depend on your account's age and type, and they apply across the whole account rather than to one estimate. When you compare an estimate with a bill, subtract the Free Tier yourself, and remember it runs out: build the estimate you will face after the allowance ends, not the one you see in the first month.

The 730-hour month comes from the same arithmetic as everyone's budget: 365 days times 24 hours, divided by 12. A 31-day month has 744 hours and a February 672, so an always-on server's real monthly line moves by a few percent around the estimate.

Saving, sharing and exporting estimates (links are public and expire)

The public calculator has no accounts, so "saving" means creating a link:

• Share on the My Estimate page creates a unique link after you accept a public server acknowledgment. The estimate is stored on AWS's public servers, and anyone who has the link can open it. Treat it like a document link set to "anyone with the link": fine for a quote you want to send, not for a confidential architecture.
• Links created on or after May 31, 2023 are valid for one year (older ones for three). Save the important ones as exports too.
• Edits are not saved to the same link. Change anything and you must share again, which creates a new link. The old link keeps showing the old numbers, which is how teams end up arguing over two versions of the same estimate.
• Export as CSV or PDF from the Export menu. The CSV opens in any spreadsheet. The PDF (and JSON exports) contain the share link, so a forwarded PDF is also a forwarded link.

A useful trick: a shared link works as a template. Build a standard estimate for a common project once, share it, and start new estimates from it. And if you later move to the in-console calculator, a workload estimate can import a public estimate through its share link, so the work is not lost.

Groups: organizing an estimate and comparing Regions

Groups organize the services in an estimate, by cost center, product, environment or client. Each group gets its own subtotal. Two especially useful patterns:

• Compare Regions: put the same services in one group for US East (N. Virginia) and another for, say, Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and compare the subtotals.
• Compare designs: one group for "EC2 + RDS" and another for "Fargate + Aurora Serverless", with the same workload, so the choice is about numbers rather than habit. Our ECS on EC2 vs Fargate comparison is an example of exactly that exercise.

Groups can be moved and nested, so an estimate for a whole company can be organized the way its finance team thinks.

The in-console Pricing Calculator: estimates with your discounts

If you already use AWS, the in-console calculator (Billing and Cost Management > Pricing Calculator) answers a different question: not "what does this cost?", but "what will this cost us?". It has two estimate types.

Workload estimates cost a specific application or change. They are free, available to every account type (standalone, member and management accounts), and ready as soon as you run them. You can add new usage, import historical usage from your own cost and usage data, or import a public calculator estimate through its share link. You choose the rate type: before discounts (public prices), after discounts (your negotiated or tiered rates), or after discounts and purchase commitments (with your Savings Plans and Reserved Instances applied). Management accounts decide which rate types their member accounts may use. A workload estimate includes only the usage you put in it.

Bill estimates model your whole consolidated bill. You build a bill scenario that starts from last month's consolidated usage, your existing Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, your benefit-sharing preferences, and the discounts, credits and refunds on your most recent bill. Then you add, change or remove usage and commitments, without touching the real ones, and run the estimate. Bill estimates are for management and standalone accounts only, take between 20 minutes and 12 hours to generate, and cost $2 each after five free estimates per calendar month; a failed estimate is neither counted nor charged. One special case: accounts that use billing transfer get estimates based on public prices, not the rates set by the bill transfer account.

This is the tool for questions such as "if we buy a $10-an-hour Compute Savings Plan and migrate these servers, what happens to next month's bill?" Our guide to choosing between Savings Plans, Reserved Instances and Spot helps you decide what to model.

Pricing Calculator vs Cost Explorer vs Budgets vs the Price List API

Use the calculator before you build, Cost Explorer after, and Budgets all the time. If an estimate and a bill disagree, Cost Explorer grouped by usage type usually shows the missing line within a minute.

Pricing Calculator API: create estimates programmatically

The public calculator has no API, but the in-console one does: bcm-pricing-calculator, with 36 operations for workload estimates, bill scenarios and bill estimates, available in the AWS SDKs and CLI (endpoint bcm-pricing-calculator.us-east-1.amazonaws.com). A workload estimate in Python:

import boto3, uuid

pc = boto3.client("bcm-pricing-calculator", region_name="us-east-1")

we = pc.create_workload_estimate(name="booking-api", rateType="AFTER_DISCOUNTS",
                                 clientToken=str(uuid.uuid4()))
pc.batch_create_workload_estimate_usage(
    workloadEstimateId=we["id"],
    clientToken=str(uuid.uuid4()),
    usage=[{"serviceCode": "AWSLambda", "usageType": "Request", "operation": "Invoke",
            "key": "lambda-requests", "group": "api",
            "usageAccountId": "123456789012", "amount": 50_000_000}],
)
est = pc.get_workload_estimate(identifier=we["id"])
print(est["status"], est.get("totalCost"), est.get("costCurrency"))

Each usage line needs a serviceCode, usageType, operation, a key you choose, the account and an amount. The usage type and operation are the same values that appear on your bill, so the quickest way to find the right ones is Cost Explorer, grouped by Usage type and then API operation for the service you are modeling. Rate types are BEFORE_DISCOUNTS, AFTER_DISCOUNTS and AFTER_DISCOUNTS_AND_COMMITMENTS. Estimate IDs are UUIDs, and estimates carry an expiresAt time, so treat them as working documents rather than an archive. This call sequence was checked against the service's own API model; the identity running it needs bcm-pricing-calculator permissions in IAM.

The CLI equivalent starts with aws bcm-pricing-calculator create-workload-estimate --name booking-api --rate-type AFTER_DISCOUNTS. For raw prices rather than estimates, the Price List API (aws pricing get-products --service-code AWSLambda --region us-east-1) returns every SKU, and our CLI --query guide shows how to filter the output.

Asking an AI assistant instead. AWS Labs publishes an open-source AWS Pricing MCP server (awslabs.aws-pricing-mcp-server, run with uvx) that lets an AI assistant query the Price List API in plain English, compare Regions and draft cost reports, and even scan CDK or Terraform projects for the services they use. It needs AWS credentials with pricing:* permissions and reads only public prices, never your account's usage. It is a fast way to get a first estimate; check the numbers in the calculator before you send them to anyone.

How reliable is the AWS Pricing Calculator?

For the usage you enter, very reliable: the calculator uses the same published prices AWS bills from, and Show calculations lets you check the arithmetic. Where estimates and bills differ, the cause is almost always one of these:

• Usage was different. Real traffic, storage and data transfer rarely match a plan. This is the biggest source of difference by far.
• A line was missing. See why estimates come out low.
• Tiers. Tiered prices (S3 storage gets cheaper after 50 TB, for example) apply across your whole account, not to one estimate line.
• The Free Tier. The calculator never subtracts it, so a small project's estimate can be higher than its bill.
• Units. Some pages ask for GB, others for TB or millions; a factor of 1,000 hides easily.
• Price changes. An estimate from last year uses last year's prices. Rebuild important estimates rather than reopening old links, which also expire.
• Discounts. The public calculator does not know your private pricing, credits or commitments; the in-console one can.

"So the calculator was right and we were wrong," Jake said, when the second estimate came within $3 of the first bill. "The calculator was right about what we told it," Ethan said. "The second time, we told it the truth."

Common Pricing Calculator problems and fixes

My shared estimate link no longer opens

Links created since May 31, 2023 are valid for one year. Rebuild the estimate, or import it into the in-console calculator before it expires, and keep CSV or PDF exports of anything important.

The shared link shows old numbers after I edited the estimate

Edits are never written back to an existing link. Choose Share again to create a new link, and send that one.

The estimate is much lower than my bill

Look for data transfer, public IPv4 addresses, NAT gateways, logs, backups and support. Then compare the bill in Cost Explorer grouped by usage type to find the line that is missing.

The calculator price differs from the service's pricing page

The pricing page is authoritative when they differ. Check that both use the same Region, tier and unit, and that the estimate is recent.

I cannot create a bill estimate

Bill estimates are only for management and standalone accounts. Member accounts can use workload estimates.

My bill estimate is still running

Bill estimates take between 20 minutes and 12 hours, depending on the size of your bill. Leave it running; failed estimates are not charged.

AccessDenied when calling bcm-pricing-calculator

The identity needs bcm-pricing-calculator permissions in IAM, and Billing and Cost Management access must be enabled for IAM users in the account.

AWS Pricing Calculator: frequently asked questions

Jake kept the second estimate, the $52 one, as a PDF in the shop's files, next to the first real bill. "Same as last time with the insurance quote," he said. "The first number is what they want you to see." "Not quite," Ethan said. "The first number was what we asked for." If an estimate on this page does not match what the calculator shows you today, please tell us. Guides like this stay accurate because readers write in.

Revision note. Written October 24, 2026, with the prices and calculator features of that day. "Count the cost before you build the tower," the old proverb says, and the calculator only counts what you show it.