AWS offers you a pay-as-you-go approach for pricing for over 100 cloud services. With AWS you pay only for the individual services you need, for as long as you use them, and without requiring long-term contracts or complex licensing. AWS pricing is similar to how you pay for utilities like water or electricity. You only pay for the services you consume, and once you stop using them, there are no additional costs or termination fees.
Unless you are in the business of building data centers, you have likely spent too much time and money doing just that. With AWS you no longer need to dedicate valuable resources to building costly infrastructure, including purchasing servers, software licenses or leasing facilities. With AWS you can replace large upfront expenses with lower variable costs and pay only for what you use and for as long as you need it. All AWS services are available on demand, and require no long term contracts and have no complex licensing dependencies.
Pay-as-you-go pricing allows you to easily adapt to changing business needs without overcommitting budgets and improving your responsiveness to changes. With a pay as you go model, you can adapt your business depending on need and not on forecasts, reducing the risk or overprovisioning or missing capacity.
By paying for services on an as needed basis, you can redirect your focus to innovation and invention, reducing procurement complexity and enabling your business to be fully elastic.
With AWS, you can get volume based discounts and realize important savings as your usage increases. For services such as S3 and data transfer OUT from EC2, pricing is tiered, meaning the more you use, the less you pay per GB. In addition, data transfer IN is always free of charge. As a result, as your AWS usage needs increase, you benefit from the economies of scale that allow you to increase adoption and keep costs under control.
As your organization evolves, AWS also gives you options to acquire services that help you address your business needs. For example, AWS’ storage services portfolio, offers options to help you lower pricing based on how frequently you access data, and the performance you need to retrieve it. To optimize your savings, choose the right combinations of storage solutions that help you reduce costs while preserving performance, security and durability.
For certain services like Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS, you can invest in reserved capacity. With Reserved Instances, you can save up to 75% over equivalent on-demand capacity. Reserved Instances are available in 3 options – All up-front (AURI), partial up-front (PURI) or no upfront payments (NURI).
When you buy Reserved Instances, the larger the upfront payment, the greater the discount. To maximize your savings, you can pay all up-front and receive the largest discount. Partial up-front RI's offer lower discounts but give you the option to spend less up front. Lastly, you can choose to spend nothing up front and receive a smaller discount, but allowing you to free up capital to spend in other projects.
By using reserved capacity, your organization can minimize risks, more predictably manage budgets, and comply with policies that require longer-term commitments.
Learn more about EC2 Reserved Instances »
Whether you are running a single instance or dozens of individual services, you can estimate your monthly bill using AWS Simple Monthly Calculator. The calculator allows you to estimate individual or multiple prices and use templates to appraise complete solutions.
The AWS TCO calculator gives you the option to evaluate the savings from using AWS and comparing against on premises and co-location environments. The TCO calculator matches your current infrastructure to the most cost effective AWS offering. This tool takes into consideration all the costs to run a solution, including physical facilities, power and cooling, providing a realistic end-to-end comparison of your costs.
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Free Tier is designed to enable you to get hands-on experience with AWS Cloud Services. The AWS Free Tier includes services with a free tier available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date, as well as additional service offers that do not automatically expire at the end of your 12 month AWS Free Tier term.
