AWS Pricing Calculator FAQs (Preview)

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General Assumptions

General

The AWS Pricing Calculator allows you to estimate your AWS costs by generating two types of results: 1/ bill estimate that assess the cost of your entire consolidated bill and 2/ workload estimate results that assess the cost of the specific workload or application that you define.

The Pricing Calculator offers three primary benefits. 1/ You will save time and money. Modeling cost scenarios like an upgrade to a business unit’s fleet can be time-consuming or can be costly given the effort. This feature reduces the time for you to understand the cost impact of your potential plans by providing the ability to fetch historical usage data and use it to model future usage changes. 2/ Your cost-awareness and confidence in planning for your business needs will increase. For example, you can now make informed decisions by modeling estimates with discounts and purchase agreements when making your next commitment decision. 3/ You can use your AWS account to create, save, retrieve and share your cost estimations iteratively and track estimations that you have created without the need to manually maintain estimate links like the public calculator experience. The Pricing Calculator reduces the complexity and effort spent in building cost estimations.

AWS Pricing Calculator is available to the management and all member accounts from the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console or via API/SDK. You will need Cost Explorer enabled so that revised Pricing Calculator can import your historical usage of existing AWS workloads. Member accounts can create estimates using discounted rates only if the management account has enabled access to view discounts. If the member account is not given permission by the management account to use discounted rates, the estimates default to public rates.

Management account users will need to configure after discount rates in Pricing Calculator rate preferences for all member accounts. Once complete, all accounts will automatically have their after-discount rates included in their workload estimates. If after-discount rates have not been configured, a workload estimate will be calculated with on-demand rates. Bill estimates will always include discounts.

We are actively working on adding more services to the AWS Pricing Calculator. Let us know your top priority service through our feedback form at the top of this page.

You can share estimates using your IAM permissions with roles and policies.

Assumptions

Your actual cost will be based on your actual use of the services, not the Calculator. The accuracy of your inputs into the Calculator affects the accuracy of your actual costs. For example,

  • If you estimate you will use a certain number of EC2 instances, but you actually use more, you will be billed for your actual utilization.
  • If you use AWS services that you did not include in your estimate, then your estimate will differ from your actual bill.
  • If you over or under estimate Data Transfer inputs or outputs for AWS services, your actual bill may vary.
  • If you estimate your service use based on purchasing a 3-year reservation for a service, but you buy a 1-year reservation, your monthly prices will vary from the estimate and coverage may vary as well.

 

The prices for AWS services vary between Regions. Using different Region than the one used in the Calculator will affect the accuracy of the results.

AWS offers pay-as-you-go pricing for most services and prices may change over time. If you buy services On Demand, your bill may be less or more than estimated, based on the current On Demand service rates. For certain services, you may buy a 1 or 3-year reservation to lock in the price as of the date of your reservation.

The Calculator does not include any taxes that may be applied to your purchase of the services.

The Calculator assumes 730 hours in a month, (365 days in a year x 24 hours in a day / 12 months in year). The Calculator does not account for leap years, which adds one day.

The Calculator does not account for promotional credits.

You may qualify for volume discounts based on your current use of AWS services, outside of what you estimate in the AWS Pricing Calculator. The Calculator assumes your usage that are eligible for tiered pricing are on top of the usage of the same product last month. For example, if you used 400 TB of Amazon S3 Standard storage last month, and you use the Calculator to estimate an additional 2000 TB per month, the Calculator will assume the tier you were in last month (i.e., $0.022 per GB) applies to your entire additional usage. Your cumulative actual spend on 2400 TB per month on Amazon S3 would be less than or equal to the estimated additional cost to your current spend.

You may qualify for free-tier of certain AWS products. If time-based free-tier applies to your usage in your last AWS anniversary bill, the Calculator assumes you are still eligible to the free-tier for your estimated cost. If usage-based free-tier applies to your usage in your last AWS anniversary bill, the Calculator uses the same tiered pricing assumption.

The Calculator includes the cost impact of discounts for which you are eligible. For more information about how discounts are applied in the Calculator, please see the user guide.

The workload estimate assumes you do not have any unused Reserved Instances or Savings Plans commitments that may be applied to the estimate. The estimated cost may be larger than your actual spend if you have unused Reserved Instances or Savings Plans commitments that can be applied to your actual usage. The Calculator accounts for commitments like Savings Plans and Reserved Instances in the bill estimate only. For more information about how commitments are applied in the Calculator, please see the user guide.

The Calculator does not allow for modeling new Spot usage. In the event you attempt to model Spot usage, these usage lines will be dropped from the estimate and treated as unchanged.

The Calculator does not consider incremental AWS Support charge as a result of increased usage in other AWS services, unless you explicitly include AWS Support into the estimate.

Bill estimates will be generated based on rates from the previous bill anniversary period. For example, if you create a bill estimate in November 2024, the rates will be based on October 2024’s billing anniversary period. For more information about various data entities in the Calculator, please see the user guide.

The Calculator performs mathematical rounding of pricing data.

Some AWS services use per second billing. The Calculator does not account for per second billing options.

The Calculator does not account for third-party licensing fees, such as software solutions deployed from AWS Marketplace.

The Calculator estimates in U.S. dollars. Global exchange rates vary over time. If you translate your estimate to a different currency based on the current exchange, changes in the exchange rate will affect the estimate.