Amazon CloudWatch pricing calculator
Logs, Metrics, Alarms & Observability. Estimate your costs using AWS list prices.
Estimates from AWS list prices, not an AWS quote. Discounts, taxes and credit terms may affect your bill.
01 · How Amazon CloudWatch pricing works
What you pay for
- Logs: ingestion per GB ($0.50 standard, $0.25 Infrequent Access; vended logs tiered), storage $0.03/GB-month, Logs Insights $0.005 per GB scanned, Live Tail, data protection.
- Metrics: custom metrics $0.30 per metric-month (tiered down at volume), API requests $0.01 per 1,000, metric streams.
- Alarms ($0.10 standard, $0.30 high-resolution, composite), dashboards ($3/month beyond the free 3), Container Insights, Application Signals, Synthetics canary runs, RUM, Contributor Insights.
Common cost traps
- Log groups default to never expire, so storage grows indefinitely.
- High-cardinality custom metrics (one metric per user, request or container) explode metric counts.
- Debug-level application logs and VPC Flow Logs can ingest terabytes.
- Container Insights and Application Signals bill per metric or signal across every container.
Ways to reduce cost
- Set retention on every log group and use the Infrequent Access log class for logs you rarely query.
- Use Embedded Metric Format with sensible dimensions; avoid per-request dimensions.
- Lower log levels in production and sample high-volume logs.
- Send long-term logs to S3 via subscriptions or export.
Free Tier & account eligibility
Free Tier depends on account age. Accounts created on or after 15 July 2025 get a $100 sign-up credit plus up to $100 more for completing onboarding activities; on the Free plan these last 6 months (or until used up), on the Paid plan unused Free Tier credits stay usable for 12 months from sign-up. Accounts created before 15 July 2025 keep the legacy Free Tier (12-month offers plus always-free offers). Always-free offers apply on both plans. Always free on both plans: 10 custom metrics and 10 alarms, 1 M API requests, 5 GB of log data (ingestion, storage and Logs Insights scans combined), 3 dashboards with up to 50 metrics each, and basic monitoring metrics for AWS services.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon CloudWatch?
CloudWatch metrics, alarms, dashboards, logs ingestion/storage/queries, Container Insights, Application Signals, Synthetics, RUM, Internet Monitor and other features are eligible usage and are offset by credits. General rules: credits only offset charges from the billing cycle in which they were applied onward (never past bills), they apply only to the services listed on the credit in Billing and Cost Management > Credits, they expire on the date shown there, and accounts on the AWS Free plan cannot receive Activate credits until they upgrade to the Paid plan.
Check my creditsExcluded charges & conditions
- Upfront payments for Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (All Upfront, and the upfront part of Partial Upfront). The recurring hourly fee of a No Upfront commitment is billed as normal usage and can be offset.
- AWS Marketplace charges (Activate credits make an exception for third-party foundation models used through Amazon Bedrock).
- AWS Enterprise Support, Enterprise On-Ramp, Unified Operations, resold support and partner-led support.
- Amazon Route 53 domain name registration and transfer fees.
- Taxes (sales, use, VAT and similar), AWS Professional Services, Training and Certification, Mechanical Turk, AWS Managed Services, and any use for cryptocurrency mining.
Illustrative credit runway
Single-service examples from the supplied data, not your calculator result. Months = credit amount ÷ monthly cost, before credit expiry. Credits can expire before these theoretical months are used; coverage and other AWS services can shorten runway.
| Usage profile | Monthly estimate | $10,000 | $25,000 | $100,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small | $17.50 | 571.4 mo. | 1,428.6 mo. | 5,714.3 mo. |
| Medium | $355.84 | 28.1 mo. | 70.3 mo. | 281.0 mo. |
| Large | $4,402.40 | 2.3 mo. | 5.7 mo. | 22.7 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
10 GB logs ingested, 50 GB stored, 30 custom metrics, 20 alarms | Logs ingestion (standard): 10 GB x $0.5 = $5.00; Logs storage: 50 GB-month x $0.03 = $1.50; Custom metrics: 30 metrics x $0.3 = $9.00; Standard alarms: 20 alarms x $0.1 = $2.00 | Total ~$17.50/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
300 GB logs ingested, 1 TB stored, 1 TB scanned by Logs Insights, 500 custom metrics, 200 alarms | Logs ingestion (standard): 300 GB x $0.5 = $150.00; Logs storage: 1,024 GB-month x $0.03 = $30.72; Logs Insights scanned: 1,024 GB x $0.005 = $5.12; Custom metrics: 500 metrics x $0.3 = $150.00; Standard alarms: 200 alarms x $0.1 = $20.00 | Total ~$355.84/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
3 TB standard + 2 TB Infrequent Access logs ingested, 20 TB stored, 5,000 custom metrics, 1,000 alarms, 2,000 ECS Container Insights metrics | Logs ingestion (standard): 3,072 GB x $0.5 = $1,536.00; Logs ingestion (IA): 2,048 GB x $0.25 = $512.00; Logs storage: 20,480 GB-month x $0.03 = $614.40; Custom metrics: 5,000 metrics x $0.3 = $1,500.00; Standard alarms: 1,000 alarms x $0.1 = $100.00; Container Insights ECS metrics: 2,000 metrics x $0.07 = $140.00 | Total ~$4,402.40/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon CloudWatch pricing FAQ
Why is CloudWatch Logs my biggest monitoring cost?
Ingestion at $0.50 per GB adds up quickly with verbose application logs, VPC Flow Logs and Lambda logs. Retention defaults to never expire.
What is the Infrequent Access log class?
A cheaper ingestion class ($0.25/GB here) for logs you rarely query, with fewer features.
What is always free?
10 custom metrics, 10 alarms, 1 M API requests, 5 GB of logs and 3 dashboards per month, on all plans.
Do credits cover CloudWatch?
Yes, it is eligible usage.
05 · Sources & estimate notes
Content pack dated 2026-10-19. Calculator rates remain their existing snapshots; this content update is not a price refresh.
Verification notes
- Runway prices come from the calculator repository snapshot rate card cloudwatch (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/pricing/ before publishing.