Price Reductions & Expanded Free Tier for the Simple Queue Service (SQS) and the Simple Notification Service (SNS)

We launched the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) in 2004 and the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) in 2010.

Our customers have constantly discovered powerful new ways to build more scalable, elastic and reliable applications with these building blocks. We learned, for example, that some customers use SQS as a buffer ahead of databases and other services. Other customers combine SNS + SQS to transmit identical messages to multiple queues.

Over time, we’ve optimized our own systems in order to make SNS and SQS available to even more customers. The goal has always been to charge less for processing the same volume of messages. We did this with the SQS Batch API in 2011 and more recently with long polling for SQS and 64KB payloads for SNS.

Today we are making SQS and SNS an even better value:

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

The new prices take effect on March 1, 2013 and are applicable in all AWS Regions with the exception of the AWS GovCloud (US).

If you’d like to learn more about SQS and SNS, check out this video from AWS re:Invent:

— Jeff (with lots of help from Jon Turow, Senior Product Manager for SQS and SNS);