Why Amazon EC2?
Amazon EC2 is free to try. There are multiple ways to pay for EC2 instances: On-Demand, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances.
For more information on how to optimize your EC2 spend, see Amazon EC2 Cost and Capacity Optimization.
Purchase models
Reserved or dedicated capacity
Per-second billing
EC2 per-second billing removes the cost of unused minutes and seconds from your bill. Focus on improving your applications instead of maximizing hourly usage, especially for instances running over irregular time periods such as dev/testing, data processing, analytics, batch processing, and gaming applications.
EC2 usage is billed in one-second increments, with a minimum of 60 seconds. Similarly, provisioned storage for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes is billed in per-second increments, with a 60-second minimum. Per-second billing is available for Amazon Linux, Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, and Ubuntu Pro instances across all Regions and AZs and is applicable across all EC2 purchase models.
For details on related costs like data transfer, Elastic IP addresses, and EBS Optimized Instances, see Amazon EC2 On-Demand Pricing.