Amazon SQS and SNS Announce Lower Prices and Expanded Free Tiers - 50% price drop for SQS

Posted on: Feb 28, 2013

We have good news to share. Effective March 1, 2013, we are reducing prices and expanding the free tier for AWS messaging services – the Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Simple Notification Service (SNS).

1. SQS API prices will decrease by 50% to $0.50 per million API requests.
2. SNS API prices will decrease by 17% to $0.50 per million API requests.
3. The SQS and SNS free tiers will each expand to 1 million free API requests per month, up 10X from 100K requests per month.

Our customers constantly discover powerful new ways to build more scalable, elastic and reliable applications using SQS and SNS. We learned, for example, that some customers use SQS as a buffer ahead of their databases and other services. Other customers combine SNS + SQS to fanout/transmit identical messages to multiple queues.

Over time, we've optimized our own systems in order to lower costs, and make SQS and SNS available for new customers and new workloads. Price cuts coupled with SQS features such as long polling (which reduces extraneous polling) and extensions to AmazonSQSAsyncClient (enables easier batching of outgoing messages, and also pre-fetching of incoming messages) give our customers a very cost-effective solution for their messaging needs. SQS can be even more cost effective for customers that use batching as SQS batches cost the same amount as single messages.

We are happy to pass along these savings to you as we continue to innovate and drive down our costs. The expanded free tier and lower prices will be available in all regions except GovCloud.

To learn more or get started with SQS and SNS, visit http://aws.amazon.com/sqs and http://aws.amazon.com/sns.