What Is Amazon Connect (Now Amazon Connect Customer)? Pricing With Examples, Login, Setup Tutorial, AI Agents and Connect vs Genesys

Amazon Connect is the AWS cloud contact center: phone numbers, IVR menus, call queues, chat, SMS, WhatsApp, email and AI agents in one service that you set up and run from a browser, with no phone hardware and no per-seat licenses. In April 2026 the contact center product was renamed Amazon Connect Customer; "Amazon Connect" is now the family name that also covers Connect Health, Connect Talent and Connect Decisions, while the console, APIs and CLI commands still use connect. You pay only for what you use. On the default Connect Customer plan, voice is $0.038 per minute, chat is $0.010 per message, SMS and WhatsApp are $0.014 per message and email is $0.080 per email, and that rate already includes AI self-service, real-time agent assistance, conversational analytics (formerly Contact Lens), forecasting and scheduling. Phone network charges come on top: in the US a local number costs $0.03 a day and inbound calls to it $0.0022 a minute. The older Customer Basic plan charges $0.018 per voice minute and bills each AI feature separately. A two-person shop taking 6,000 call minutes a month pays about $242 on Connect Customer or $122 on Customer Basic. Below: what it is, how it works, every price with worked examples, the login and agent URLs, a setup tutorial, Lambda and API code, quotas, Regions, and Connect vs Genesys and other contact centers.

Jake's repair shop had a phone problem, and not the kind he fixes. With two locations and two technicians, the shop's one landline rang all day, mostly with the same three questions: "Is my phone ready?", "Do you fix this model?" and "Are you open Sunday?" Every call pulled someone off a repair, and every missed call was a customer who tried the shop down the road. A local telecom company quoted him a "contact center package" at a monthly price per seat with a two-year contract. Jake forwarded the quote to Ethan with one line: "What is Amazon Connect, and is it cheaper than this?"

New to AWS? The cards below cover Lambda, Bedrock, single sign-on, S3 and the Free Tier, the pieces an Amazon Connect contact center leans on.

What is Amazon Connect (now Amazon Connect Customer)?

Amazon Connect is a contact center as a service (CCaaS): everything a customer service team needs to talk to customers, hosted by AWS and paid by the minute or message. AWS built it first for Amazon's own customer service, then opened it to everyone in 2017. You get:

• Phone numbers (local and toll-free) in dozens of countries, which you claim in the console in a minute or port from your current carrier.
• An IVR and routing engine, called flows, that you build by dragging blocks on a canvas: greet the caller, check opening hours, offer a menu, ask an AI agent, look something up in your database and send the contact to the right queue.
• Queues and routing profiles that decide which agent gets which call, chat or email.
• A browser-based agent phone, the Contact Control Panel (CCP), and a fuller agent workspace, so your agents work from any laptop with a headset.
• Digital channels: web and in-app chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Apple Messages for Business, email, tasks, in-app and web calling, video and screen sharing.
• AI built in: AI agents that answer customers by voice and chat, real-time suggestions for human agents, call and chat summaries, sentiment and theme analytics, and automated quality evaluations.
• Workforce tools: forecasting, capacity planning, agent scheduling, real-time and historical reports, and recordings stored in your own Amazon S3 bucket.

The 2026 rename. In April 2026 AWS split Amazon Connect into a family of four agentic AI products. The contact center you are reading about became Amazon Connect Customer. The other three are separate products with their own pricing:

• Amazon Connect Health: AI for healthcare providers, including patient engagement and an ambient documentation agent that writes clinical notes, priced at $99 per user per month for up to 600 encounters per user.
• Amazon Connect Talent: AI-run candidate evaluations for high-volume hiring, at $20 per completed candidate evaluation.
• Amazon Connect Decisions: AI teammates for supply chain planning, priced by quote.

Days before the rename, AWS acquired NLX, a conversational AI company known for no-code tools that let business teams design customer conversations without engineering help. Connect Customer now includes a no-code canvas for designing AI conversations, the Agentic CX Designer. Nothing changed for existing users at the rename: the same instances, phone numbers, flows, APIs and bills carried on under the new name, and you will still see "Amazon Connect" across the console and the AWS CLI.

Jake: "So it's a phone system I rent by the minute instead of by the person?"

Ethan: "A phone system, a chat system and an answering robot, rented by the minute. If nobody calls on Sunday, Sunday costs you nothing."

How Amazon Connect works

Every Amazon Connect contact center lives in an instance: a container for your phone numbers, users, queues, flows, recordings and settings, created in one AWS Region. Most businesses run one production instance (and often a second one for testing). Here is what happens when a customer calls:

1. The call reaches your number. You claimed the number in Connect, or ported it, and attached it to a flow.
2. The flow runs. Your flow plays a greeting, checks your hours of operation, maybe asks "Press 1 for repair status, 2 to book a repair," maybe hands the caller to an AI agent that understands plain speech, and maybe calls a Lambda function to look the caller up in your database.
3. The contact joins a queue. If a person is needed, the flow sets a working queue (for example, "Repairs") and transfers the contact to it. The caller hears your hold music or a callback offer.
4. Routing picks an agent. Each agent has a routing profile that lists the queues and channels they handle and how many contacts at once (one call, or several chats). The longest-waiting contact goes to the agent who has been available longest, unless you add skills (proficiencies) or priorities.
5. The agent answers in the browser. The CCP rings, the agent sees the caller's details, talks, transfers or puts on hold, and writes notes. On Connect Customer, an AI assistant suggests answers in real time.
6. After the contact. The agent spends a few seconds in After Contact Work (ACW), the recording and transcript go to S3, analytics produce a summary and sentiment, and the contact appears in your reports.

Chat, SMS, WhatsApp and email follow the same path: same flows, same queues, same agents. That is the main design idea behind Connect: one routing engine for every channel, so a customer who starts on chat and then calls is handled by the same rules and seen as the same person.

The building blocks you will meet in the admin website:

• Hours of operation: your opening times per queue, with holiday overrides.
• Queues: waiting lines, each with its own hours, maximum contacts and caller ID.
• Routing profiles: which queues and channels an agent takes, and with which priority.
• Security profiles: what each user can see and do (Admin, Agent, CallCenterManager, QualityAnalyst, or your own).
• Flows: inbound flows, customer queue flows (what callers hear while waiting), whisper flows (what the agent hears before the call connects) and more.
• Prompts: recorded audio, or text that Amazon Polly reads aloud in natural voices.
• Quick connects: saved transfer targets, such as "Transfer to Billing" or an external number.

Jake: "So my phone menu is basically a flowchart."

Ethan: "Literally a flowchart. You'll draw it with boxes and arrows, and the caller walks through it."

Amazon Connect features, channel by channel

Here is what you can turn on, grouped by job. On the Connect Customer plan the AI and analytics items below are part of the per-minute or per-message rate; on Customer Basic most of them are billed separately.

• Voice: inbound and outbound calls, IVR menus with touch-tone or speech, call recording, transfers, conferences with up to six participants, callbacks (including customer-first callbacks on Connect Customer, which dial the customer first and only offer the callback to an agent once the customer answers), and estimated wait time announcements.
• Chat: a website chat widget you paste into your site, in-app chat for mobile apps, persistent chats that keep history, attachments, and rich messages such as buttons and lists.
• Messaging: SMS, WhatsApp Business messaging and Apple Messages for Business, handled by the same agents and flows.
• Email: inbound and outbound email routed like any other contact, with a built-in email domain or your own custom domains through Amazon SES.
• Tasks: work items (a refund to approve, a callback to make, a ticket from another system) routed to agents just like calls.
• Video, in-app and web calling: calls from your website or app without a phone number, with optional video and screen sharing.
• AI agents for self-service: agentic voice and chat that understand what the customer wants, look up answers in your knowledge base, and take actions such as rebooking or checking an order. Agentic voice supports more than 50 languages and more than 100 voices.
• Agent assist: live suggestions, next-best-action guidance and knowledge articles for human agents during the conversation. This was sold as Amazon Q in Connect; it is now one of the AI agents in Connect.
• Conversational analytics: transcripts, sentiment, theme detection, contact categories, sensitive data redaction and post-contact summaries for voice, chat, messaging and email. This was Contact Lens; the API still uses that name.
• Performance evaluations: scorecards for agents and for AI self-service, filled in by supervisors or by generative AI.
• Forecasting, capacity planning and scheduling: predicted volumes and staff schedules (for voice, chat and messaging).
• Outbound campaigns: predictive, progressive and preview dialing, plus SMS, WhatsApp and email campaigns.
• Customer Profiles and Cases: a unified profile per customer that pulls in data from your other systems, and case tracking for issues that take several contacts to resolve.
• Live Sync: new in September 2026; it keeps a screen on the customer's phone or browser in step with the voice conversation, so they can see options and fill forms while they talk.
• Global Resiliency: a replica of your instance in a second Region, with traffic distribution groups to split or fail over calls.
• Analytics data lake: contact records, agent events and analytics in tables you can query with Amazon Athena or chart in Amazon QuickSight.

One retirement to know about: Voice ID, the caller voice authentication feature, ended on May 20, 2026. Our list of AWS services retired in 2026 covers it and the alternatives.

Amazon Connect pricing: every rate

Amazon Connect has no seat licenses, no minimum commitment and no setup fee. Your bill has two parts:

1. Service usage: what Connect charges per voice minute, chat message, SMS, email, task or case. Your plan decides the rate.
2. Telephony: what the phone network charges, per phone number per day and per minute of calls in and out. This is the same on both plans and depends on the country and number type.

There are two plans, chosen per instance:

• Connect Customer (formerly "Unlimited AI"), the default for every new instance: higher channel rates with the AI and analytics features included.
• Customer Basic: lower channel rates, with each AI feature billed on its own when you use it. Some features, such as the Agentic CX Designer, agentic voice, customer-first callbacks and AI agent evaluations, exist only on Connect Customer.

Here is how the two compare, using US list prices in October 2026:

What you use	Connect Customer	Customer Basic
Voice (inbound or outbound)	$0.038 per minute	$0.018 per minute
Chat	$0.010 per message	$0.004 per message
SMS, WhatsApp, Apple Messages	$0.014 per message	$0.010 per message
Email	$0.080 per email	$0.050 per email
Outbound campaign voice	$0.045 per minute	$0.025 per minute + $0.005 per call attempt + $0.005 per profile per day
Tasks	$0.070 per task	$0.04 per task
Cases	$0.12 per case created	$0.12 per case created
Conversational analytics and summaries	Included	$0.015 per voice minute (first 5 million), then $0.0125; $0.0015 per chat or message
AI self-service (plus Amazon Lex)	Included, Lex requests too	$0.008 per voice minute, $0.0015 per message, plus Lex charges
Real-time agent assistance	Included	$0.008 per voice minute, $0.0015 per message, $0.020 per inbound email
Forecasting and scheduling	Included (voice, chat, messaging)	$27 per agent per month
Performance evaluations	Included	$12 per agent per month
Screen recording	Included (voice, chat, messaging)	$0.006 per minute

A few more rates you may meet: in-app and web calling audio is $0.010 per minute, video and screen sharing are $0.015 per minute, Live Sync adds $0.01 per minute on top of the channel rate (free while its trial runs to November 30, 2026), and Customer Profiles cost $0.005 per profile used per day once you bring in outside data (reading profiles built from Connect's own data is free). If you build AI agents that use Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases or AgentCore Gateway tools, those are billed by Amazon Bedrock separately.

Telephony in the US costs:

Telephony item (US)	Price	Per month (30 days)
Local number (DID)	$0.03 per day	$0.90
Toll-free number	$0.06 per day ($0 for the first 12 months on the Free Tier)	$1.80
Inbound call to a local number	$0.0022 per minute	$2.20 per 1,000 minutes
Inbound call to a toll-free number	$0.012 per minute	$12 per 1,000 minutes
Outbound call to a US number	$0.0048 per minute	$4.80 per 1,000 minutes

How billing is counted: the Connect voice minute is billed per second with a 10-second minimum; telephony is billed per second with a 60-second minimum per call; chat, messaging, email, tasks and cases are billed per unit; forecasting and evaluations (on Basic) are billed per agent per month. A call is billed for both parts, so one 5-minute inbound call to a local US number on Connect Customer costs 5 x $0.038 + 5 x $0.0022 = $0.201, about 20 cents.

Outside the US: the channel rates are the same list prices, but telephony varies a lot by country and number type, and toll-free calls cost more than local calls everywhere. If you are pricing a UK contact center in the Europe (London) Region or an Australian one in Asia Pacific (Sydney), check the telephony table for your country on the pricing page before you choose between local and freephone numbers, because telephony can be a large share of a voice-heavy bill.

Worked examples: what a real month costs

Example 1: Jake's two-location repair shop. Two technicians, one local number, about 1,500 inbound calls a month averaging 4 minutes, so 6,000 minutes.

• Connect Customer voice: 6,000 x $0.038 = $228.00
• Inbound telephony: 6,000 x $0.0022 = $13.20
• Local number: 30 x $0.03 = $0.90
• Total on Connect Customer: $242.10 a month, with an AI agent that can answer "Is my phone ready?", call summaries, sentiment and scheduling included.
• Same calls on Customer Basic: 6,000 x $0.018 = $108.00, plus the same $14.10 of telephony = $122.10 a month, with no AI features.

Now add the features to Basic. Conversational analytics on every minute is 6,000 x $0.015 = $90, and real-time agent assistance is 6,000 x $0.008 = $48, so Basic with both comes to $260.10, more than Connect Customer. The rule of thumb: if you will use the AI and analytics features on most of your contacts, Connect Customer is cheaper; if you only need calls and queues, Customer Basic is about half the price.

Example 2: a 10-agent team on a toll-free number. 25,000 voice minutes, 30,000 chat messages and 2,000 emails a month.

• Voice: 25,000 x $0.038 = $950.00
• Toll-free inbound telephony: 25,000 x $0.012 = $300.00
• Toll-free number: 30 x $0.06 = $1.80 (free in your first 12 months on the Free Tier)
• Chat: 30,000 x $0.010 = $300.00
• Email: 2,000 x $0.080 = $160.00
• Total: $1,711.80 a month, about $171 per agent with AI, analytics and scheduling included. A quiet month with half the volume costs half as much.

Switching that team to a local number instead of toll-free would cut telephony from $300 to 25,000 x $0.0022 = $55, saving $245 a month, which is why many businesses keep a toll-free number for sales and send existing customers to a local one.

Example 3: a 40-agent omnichannel center. 80,000 voice minutes on two local numbers, 40,000 chat messages and 10,000 SMS messages.

• Voice: 80,000 x $0.038 = $3,040.00
• Inbound telephony: 80,000 x $0.0022 = $176.00
• Two local numbers: 2 x 30 x $0.03 = $1.80
• Chat: 40,000 x $0.010 = $400.00
• SMS: 10,000 x $0.014 = $140.00
• Total: $3,757.80 a month, or about $94 per agent.

Example 4: an outbound reminder campaign. 10,000 call attempts to US numbers, 25% answered, 30 seconds each. Answered calls use 2,500 x 0.5 = 1,250 minutes; unanswered attempts are billed at the 10-second minimum, 7,500 x 10 seconds = 1,250 minutes, so 2,500 campaign minutes in total.

• Connect Customer: 2,500 x $0.045 = $112.50, plus outbound telephony on the 2,500 answered calls at the 60-second minimum, 2,500 x $0.0048 = $12.00. Total: $124.50.
• Customer Basic: 2,500 x $0.025 = $62.50, plus 10,000 attempts x $0.005 = $50.00, plus 10,000 profiles x $0.005 = $50.00, plus the same $12.00 telephony. Total: $174.50.

For outbound campaigns, Connect Customer is the cheaper plan, because Basic adds per-attempt and per-profile fees. You will also need a quota increase before your first campaign call, because the default for concurrent campaign calls is zero (more in the quotas section).

Ethan: "Your quote was a monthly fee per seat, times two seats, times 24 months, whether the phone rings or not. Connect is about $242 a month at today's volume, with the robot included, and nothing to sign."

Jake: "And if a month is slow?"

Ethan: "Then it's a slow bill."

To estimate your own bill, the AWS Pricing Calculator at calculator.aws includes Amazon Connect: enter your monthly minutes, messages, numbers and country, and it shows the service and telephony lines separately. Then set an AWS Budgets alert at your expected spend, as in our three-layer billing alerts setup, so a runaway campaign or a looping flow shows up in a day instead of on the invoice.

Is Amazon Connect free? The free tier and trials

Amazon Connect is not free, but you can try it for very little. Channel usage (voice minutes, chat messages, SMS, email) is charged from your first contact, and a test month with a few hundred minutes of calls usually costs a few dollars. There is no monthly fee, so an instance you are not using costs only the daily phone number charge (3 cents a day for a US local number).

What the Free Tier and trials give you, mostly useful on Customer Basic where these features cost extra:

• Toll-free number: $0 for your first 12 months.
• Conversational analytics: first-time users get 100,000 voice minutes a month free for the first two months, and 500 chat messages a month for 12 months.
• Customer Profiles: 1,000 profiles a month for 12 months.
• Performance evaluations: a 30-day free trial from first activation.
• Forecasting, capacity planning and scheduling: a 90-day free trial from first activation.
• Live Sync: metered but not billed until November 30, 2026.

Free Tier allowances for analytics and evaluations are tied to your AWS payer account, so a second account under the same organization does not get a second round. If your AWS account was opened after July 15, 2025, it may be on the newer credit-based Free Tier instead; our Free Tier types explainer shows how to tell which one you have and what the credits cover.

A cheap way to evaluate: create an instance, claim one local number, build a simple flow, test with a handful of calls and chats for a week, then release the number when you are done. Your total will be well under $10, and you will know exactly how the agent experience feels before you move a single real customer.

Amazon Connect login: admin, agent and emergency URLs

Amazon Connect has its own login, separate from the AWS console. When you create an instance you choose an access URL alias (for example, jakes-repairs), which must be unique across all Regions and cannot be changed later. Your URLs are built from it:

• Admin website: https://jakes-repairs.my.connect.aws/. This is where admins and supervisors manage users, queues, flows, reports and recordings.
• Older instances use https://jakes-repairs.awsapps.com/connect/login instead; use whichever address your instance's Overview page shows.
• Contact Control Panel (agent phone): https://jakes-repairs.my.connect.aws/ccp-v2/.
• Agent workspace (CCP plus customer details, cases, step-by-step guides and AI suggestions): https://jakes-repairs.my.connect.aws/agent-app-v2/.

To find your access URL: sign in to the AWS console, search for Amazon Connect, choose your instance alias, and open Overview. The access URL is listed there.

How users log in depends on the identity option you picked when you created the instance (this choice is permanent too):

• Users stored in Amazon Connect: each user gets a username and password at the access URL. An admin creates them and can reset passwords under Users, User management.
• Linked to an existing directory: users sign in with their AWS Directory Service (Active Directory) credentials.
• SAML 2.0: users sign in through your identity provider, such as Microsoft Entra ID, Okta or AWS IAM Identity Center, and land in Connect with no separate password.

Emergency access: if the normal login is unavailable (for example, your SAML identity provider is down), an AWS account user with the right IAM permissions can open the instance in the AWS console and choose Log in for emergency access on the Overview page. It signs you in as an administrator. Keep it for real emergencies and use the access URL for daily work.

Jake: "So the guys open a web page, put on a headset and they're the call center?"

Ethan: "That's it. Bookmark /ccp-v2 on their laptops and you're done with desk phones."

Amazon Connect tutorial: take your first call in 30 minutes

This is the shortest path from nothing to a working phone line. You need an AWS account with permission to create Connect instances (the AmazonConnect_FullAccess managed policy covers it) and a headset.

1. Pick your Region. Choose the Region closest to your callers that supports the phone numbers you need: US East (N. Virginia) or US West (Oregon) for the US, Europe (London) for the UK, Asia Pacific (Sydney) for Australia, Canada (Central) for Canada. Instances cannot move between Regions later.
2. Create the instance. In the AWS console, open Amazon Connect and choose Get started (or Add an instance). Pick Store users in Amazon Connect unless you already use SAML, and enter your access URL alias.
3. Add an administrator with a name, password and email.
4. Telephony: tick both Receive inbound calls and Make outbound calls.
5. Data storage: keep the defaults. Connect creates an S3 bucket for recordings, transcripts and reports, encrypted with a KMS key, and a Customer Profiles domain.
6. Review and create. The instance is ready in a couple of minutes. Open the access URL and log in as your administrator.
7. Claim a phone number. In the admin website choose Channels, Phone numbers, Claim a number, pick the country and DID (local) or toll-free, and pick a number from the list. Some countries ask for business documents first.
8. Set hours of operation. Under Routing, Hours of operation, create your opening hours, for example Monday to Saturday, 9 to 6.
9. Create a queue. Under Routing, Queues, add "Repairs" with those hours.
10. Create a routing profile. Under Routing, Routing profiles, add "Technicians" with the Repairs queue on voice and chat.
11. Build a flow. Under Routing, Flows, create an inbound flow (the next section shows a full one), then choose Publish.
12. Attach the flow to the number. Back on Phone numbers, edit your number and select the flow.
13. Create your agents. Under Users, User management, add each person with the Agent security profile and the Technicians routing profile.
14. Test. Log in as an agent at /ccp-v2/, allow the microphone, set your status to Available, and call your new number from your mobile. The CCP rings; answer it.

Two tips that save an afternoon. First, if the CCP shows a microphone error or the call connects with no audio, run the Endpoint Test Utility (covered in the troubleshooting section) before you change anything else. Second, keep a copy of the sample flows Connect installs in every new instance, such as the default customer queue flow, as a reference while you build your own.

Ethan built Jake's instance on a Tuesday evening in about forty minutes, most of it spent recording the greeting four times because Jake kept laughing halfway through.

Flows, IVR and Lambda: a working example

A flow is a set of blocks joined by arrows. Each block does one thing and has outcomes (success, error, timeout, or the digit the caller pressed) that lead to the next block. Here is the flow Ethan built for Jake, block by block:

1. Set logging behavior: on, so every step is logged to Amazon CloudWatch for troubleshooting.
2. Set recording and analytics behavior: record the agent and customer, with analytics on.
3. Check hours of operation: if closed, play "We're closed; you can text this number any time" and disconnect.
4. Invoke AWS Lambda function: look up the caller's number in the repair database.
5. Check contact attributes: if a repair was found, play "Your repair is $.External.status" and offer "Press 1 to speak to a technician."
6. Get customer input: "Press 1 for repair status, 2 to book a repair, 3 for opening hours," or let the AI agent handle speech.
7. Set working queue: Repairs.
8. Transfer to queue: the caller hears hold music and an estimated wait time.

The Lambda function receives the contact's details as JSON and returns a flat map of string values, which the flow reads as $.External.name. A minimal Python version:

import boto3

table = boto3.resource("dynamodb").Table("repairs")

def lambda_handler(event, context):
    # The caller's number, in E.164 format, for example +15555550123
    phone = event["Details"]["ContactData"]["CustomerEndpoint"]["Address"]
    item = table.get_item(Key={"phone": phone}).get("Item")
    if not item:
        return {"found": "false"}
    # Return only strings: the flow reads these as $.External.status, $.External.ready
    return {
        "found": "true",
        "status": item["status"],          # for example "ready for pickup"
        "ready": item.get("ready_date", "")
    }

Connect needs permission to call your function. The easy way: in the AWS console, open your instance, choose Flows, and add the function under AWS Lambda; Connect adds the permission for you. The CLI way:

aws lambda add-permission --function-name repair-lookup \
  --statement-id connect-invoke --action lambda:InvokeFunction \
  --principal connect.amazonaws.com --source-account 111122223333 \
  --source-arn arn:aws:connect:us-east-1:111122223333:instance/a1b2c3d4-5678-90ab-cdef-EXAMPLE11111

Keep these limits in mind: a Lambda call from a flow can wait at most 8 seconds, so keep database lookups fast, and nested objects in the response work only when you set the block's response validation to JSON; with the default string map they make the block fail. If the block takes the Error branch, the first places to look are the function's own CloudWatch logs and the flow logs.

Outbound calls from code. To call a customer from your own app (for example, "your repair is ready"), use the StartOutboundVoiceContact API. With boto3:

import boto3

connect = boto3.client("connect", region_name="us-east-1")

resp = connect.start_outbound_voice_contact(
    InstanceId="a1b2c3d4-5678-90ab-cdef-EXAMPLE11111",
    ContactFlowId="c0ffee12-3456-7890-abcd-EXAMPLE22222",   # your outbound flow's ID
    DestinationPhoneNumber="+15555550123",
    SourcePhoneNumber="+15555550100",   # a number you claimed (or pass QueueId instead)
    Attributes={"repair_id": "R-1042", "status": "ready for pickup"},
)
print(resp["ContactId"])

The outbound flow can then play "Hi, this is Jake's Repairs. Your phone is $.Attributes.status." For hundreds or thousands of calls, use outbound campaigns instead of a loop, because campaigns pace calls, detect answering machines and respect calling hours. The Connect API allows 2 requests per second (burst 5) for most operations per account and Region, so a tight loop of API calls will be throttled.

For deeper integrations, the open-source Amazon Connect Streams JavaScript library embeds the CCP in your own web app or CRM and gives you events such as "call connected" and "agent available," and the Connect API manages users, queues, flows and metrics from code, Terraform or CloudFormation.

AI agents in Amazon Connect

AI is the main reason the default plan changed. On Connect Customer, these are part of the per-minute and per-message rate:

• Self-service AI agents answer customers by voice or chat in plain language, keep context across channels, search your knowledge base and take actions through tools you connect (check an order, rebook an appointment, process a return). Steps that must happen exactly right, such as identity checks or legal disclosures, run as fixed, rule-based steps inside the same conversation.
• Agent assist listens to live conversations and suggests answers, knowledge articles and next steps to your human agents, and writes the summary when the contact ends.
• Agentic CX Designer, a no-code canvas where business and customer experience teams design AI conversations, with templates for common use cases. Developers can still build in flows, Amazon Lex and the API.
• AI agent observability: built-in metrics that score how well your AI agents handled conversations, using an LLM as the judge, alongside evaluations of human agents.
• Third-party AI agents: you can connect your own agents, for example ones built on Bedrock AgentCore, and let them work with Connect's agents (text collaboration is $0.001 per message, two-way voice $0.01 per minute).

Your AI agents learn from a knowledge base: upload FAQs, policies and how-to articles (up to 5,000 content items per knowledge base by default) or connect a source such as a website or SharePoint, and the agents answer from it. Start with your top ten customer questions; for Jake's shop, three questions covered more than half of all calls.

A month after go-live, the AI agent was answering "Is my phone ready?" on its own for about 60 percent of callers, using the same repair lookup as the menu, and Jake's technicians were taking about 15 calls a day instead of 50.

Amazon Connect quotas and limits

New accounts start with conservative defaults, and you request increases through Service Quotas or AWS Support after the instance exists. Small increases are often approved in hours; large ones can take up to three weeks, so ask before a launch, not on launch day.

Quota	Default	What happens at the limit
Concurrent active calls per instance	10	Callers hear a fast busy (reorder) tone
Concurrent active chats per instance	500 (includes SMS and WhatsApp)	New chats fail with a quota error
Concurrent campaign calls per instance	0	Campaign calls cannot start until raised
Phone numbers per instance	10	"You've reached the limit of Phone Numbers"
Instances per Region	2	Cannot create another instance
Users per instance	500	Cannot add users
Queues / flows per instance	100 / 100	Cannot create more
Lambda functions per instance	50	Cannot add more functions
Connect API rate (most operations)	2 per second, burst 5	ThrottlingException

The one that surprises most new users is 10 concurrent calls. It counts calls in flows, in queue, with agents and outbound, so a busy Monday morning with 8 people on hold and 3 talking to agents already reaches it, and the twelfth caller hears a fast busy tone. If your account's applied value looks lower than the defaults above, that is normal for older accounts; request what you need.

Regions, and availability in the UK, Australia and India

Amazon Connect runs in these Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Europe (London), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Africa (Cape Town) and AWS GovCloud (US-West). Not every feature is in every Region; agent assist, forecasting, agentic voice and the Agentic CX Designer, for example, are missing from Cape Town, and GovCloud lacks most messaging channels.

• UK: use Europe (London). UK local and freephone numbers are available, and campaigns from London or Frankfurt can call the UK and most of western Europe.
• Australia and New Zealand: use Asia Pacific (Sydney), which supports Australian and New Zealand numbers and campaigns.
• India: there is no Connect Region in India, and the Connect Customer plan is not available to customers billed through AWS India (Amazon Web Services India Private Limited); trying to create an instance from such an account returns an error. Indian businesses usually work with an AWS partner on options.

Campaign calling is tied to the instance's Region: an instance in the US Regions can call the US, Mexico and Brazil, one in Canada (Central) can call Canada, and so on. A London instance cannot run a campaign to US numbers. Plan the Region around where your customers are.

Amazon Connect vs Genesys, Five9, Twilio Flex and others

The biggest difference is the pricing model. Most contact center platforms, including Genesys Cloud CX, Five9, NICE CXone and Talkdesk, sell per-agent licenses by the month, often on annual contracts, with AI features in higher tiers or as add-ons. Amazon Connect charges per minute and per message, with no seats.

• Connect vs Genesys: Genesys Cloud CX is a mature, feature-rich suite with deep workforce engagement tools, a large partner marketplace and strong omnichannel routing, and it suits large centers that want everything from one vendor. Connect wins on cost for variable or seasonal volumes, on speed of setup, and on integration with your own AWS systems (Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, Bedrock). Large, stable teams that are busy all day should compare a full year of both bills.
• Connect vs Five9: Five9 is known for its outbound dialers and blended inbound and outbound work. Connect's outbound campaigns cover predictive and progressive dialing, priced per minute instead of per seat.
• Connect vs Twilio Flex: both are programmable. Twilio Flex gives developers a very flexible agent interface on Twilio's communications APIs; Connect gives more out of the box (routing, reports, analytics, AI) with less code, inside AWS.
• Connect vs Zendesk, Freshdesk or Salesforce: those are help desks and CRMs. Connect is often the phone and routing layer under them: Salesforce Service Cloud Voice with Amazon Connect, and Connect integrations for Zendesk and ServiceNow, put the call controls inside the tool your agents already use.

Is Amazon Connect a CRM? No. It has a light customer record (Customer Profiles, which combine contact history with data from your other systems) and Cases for tracking issues across contacts, which is enough for many small teams. If you already have a CRM, connect the two instead of replacing it.

Is Amazon Connect a phone system? It is a cloud phone system for customer-facing teams, with numbers, IVR, queues and recordings. It is not a full office PBX: there are no desk-phone extensions out of the box. Companies usually keep Microsoft Teams Phone or another business phone system for internal calls and use Connect for customers.

Ethan: "If your team was 300 people taking calls eight hours a day, I'd put both quotes side by side. For two technicians and a phone that rings at lunch, paying per minute is hard to beat."

Amazon Connect not working? Common problems and fixes

Start with the Endpoint Test Utility. For any CCP, audio or connectivity problem, open https://tools.connect.aws/endpoint-test/ on the agent's computer. It checks that the browser supports WebRTC, that it can use the microphone and speakers, the latency to every Connect Region (and to your instance if you enter it), and the ports media needs. Download the JSON result and attach it to a support case if you need help.

• Callers hear a fast busy tone. You reached the concurrent active calls quota (10 by default). Request an increase for the instance.
• "You've reached the limit of Phone Numbers" on your first claim. This happens to some new accounts even with zero numbers. It needs AWS Support; open a case from the Service Quotas page.
• CCP microphone error or no audio. Allow the microphone in the browser's site settings, close other apps that hold the headset, and make sure your firewall allows outbound UDP 3478 and the Connect domains (*.my.connect.aws, *.awsapps.com and the media endpoints). An ice_collection_timeout error almost always means UDP 3478 is blocked.
• Agent is Available but never gets calls. Check that the agent's routing profile includes the queue on the voice channel, that the flow sets that queue before Transfer to queue, that the flow is published (not just saved), and that the phone number points to that flow.
• Calls go straight to the closed message. The hours of operation use the wrong time zone, or a holiday override is still active.
• Lambda block always takes the Error branch. The function is not added to the instance (permission missing), it takes longer than the block's timeout (8 seconds at most), or it returns nested objects while the block expects a string map. Check the function's CloudWatch logs.
• Outbound calls fail. Outbound calling is not enabled in the instance's telephony settings, the destination country is not on your instance's allowed list, or the queue's outbound caller ID number is missing.
• Login page loops or shows "session expired." Clear cookies for the access URL, allow third-party cookies if the CCP is embedded in another site, and confirm you are using the right alias (each instance has its own).
• Is Amazon Connect down? Check the AWS Health Dashboard (health.aws.amazon.com) for Amazon Connect in your Region; your account's own view shows events that affect your resources. Outages are rare and usually Regional, which is the case for Global Resiliency in larger centers.

Best practices and cost controls

• Pick the plan per instance. Turn Connect Customer on if you will use AI and analytics on most contacts; switch to Customer Basic (instance settings, Connect Customer, Disable) for a plain phone line, after checking no flow uses Connect Customer-only features, which would fail at runtime.
• Use local numbers where you can. In the US, toll-free inbound minutes cost more than five times as much as local ones.
• Let AI agents take the repetitive calls. On Connect Customer the AI is already in the rate, so every call it finishes saves agent time at no extra Connect cost.
• Keep hold times short. Voice minutes are billed while callers wait in queue too, so long holds cost money as well as patience. Offer callbacks when the wait is long.
• Set S3 lifecycle rules on the recordings bucket, moving old recordings to cheaper storage classes and deleting them when your retention period ends.
• Request quotas early: concurrent calls, phone numbers and campaign calls, sized for your busiest hour plus headroom.
• Use a test instance for flow changes, and version flows before publishing to production.
• Turn on flow logging and CloudWatch alarms for queue size and abandoned calls, so problems show up before customers complain.
• Lock down admin access: give agents the Agent security profile only, and use SAML single sign-on with multi-factor authentication for admins.

Frequently asked questions

Six weeks in, Jake's first full bill came to $231, a bit under Ethan's estimate because the AI agent had shortened a lot of calls. The landline was gone, the technicians answered from a laptop in the workshop only when a caller actually needed a person, and the "Are you open Sunday?" question had been answered 340 times by a voice that didn't laugh once halfway through the greeting. Jake sent Ethan one line: "Cancel the telecom guy."

Revision note. Written October 21, 2026. Prices are US list prices on that date. We will update this page when Amazon Connect prices, plans or features change.