Amazon Cognito pricing calculator
MAUs, M2M Tokens & API Quotas. 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 Cognito pricing works
What you pay for
- User pools per monthly active user (MAU) by tier: Lite tiered from $0.0055, Essentials $0.015, Plus $0.02.
- SAML/OIDC federated MAU: $0.015 beyond 50 free.
- M2M: per successful token request, tiered from $0.00225; advanced security features (Lite) and multi-Region replication per MAU; higher API quotas per RPS-month.
- SMS and email for verification/MFA billed through SNS and SES; identity pools free.
Common cost traps
- Plus tier has no free MAUs, so switching a large pool to Plus is a step change.
- Each M2M token request is billed; services that request a new token per call instead of caching are expensive.
- SMS MFA through SNS can cost more than Cognito itself in some countries.
- Admin operations such as AdminGetUser count the user as active for the month.
Ways to reduce cost
- Cache M2M access tokens until expiry.
- Prefer email or authenticator-app MFA over SMS.
- Use Essentials unless you need Plus threat protection.
- Avoid batch jobs that touch every user and make them all MAUs.
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 and for all accounts: 10,000 MAU per month for Lite or Essentials (direct and social sign-in), 50 federated MAU, and identity pools. Plus and M2M have no free tier. Older accounts that met the Nov 22, 2024 conditions keep 50,000 free Lite MAU.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon Cognito?
Cognito user pool MAUs (Lite, Essentials, Plus), M2M token requests, advanced security features, multi-Region replication and API quota increases 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 | $225.00 | 44.4 mo. | 111.1 mo. | 444.4 mo. |
| Medium | $6,066.75 | 1.6 mo. | 4.1 mo. | 16.5 mo. |
| Large | $20,400.00 | 0.5 mo. | 1.2 mo. | 4.9 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
Essentials tier, 25,000 MAU (15,000 beyond the 10,000 always-free MAU) | Essentials MAU beyond free tier: 15,000 MAU x $0.015 = $225.00 | Total ~$225.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
Essentials, 200,000 MAU (190,000 billable) + 2,000 SAML-federated MAU + 2 M M2M token requests | Essentials MAU beyond free tier: 190,000 MAU x $0.015 = $2,850.00; Federated MAU beyond 50 free: 1,950 MAU x $0.015 = $29.25; M2M token requests: 2,000,000 requests tiered (250,000 @ $0.00225; 1,750,000 @ $0.0015) = $3,187.50 | Total ~$6,066.75/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
Plus tier, 1 M MAU, plus 20 RPS extra user-authentication quota | Plus MAU (no free tier): 1,000,000 MAU x $0.02 = $20,000.00; Extra auth API quota: 20 RPS-months x $20 = $400.00 | Total ~$20,400.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon Cognito pricing FAQ
How many users are free?
10,000 MAU per month on Lite or Essentials, plus 50 SAML/OIDC MAU, for every account indefinitely. Plus has no free tier.
What counts as an MAU?
A user with any identity operation in the month: sign-up, sign-in, token refresh, password change, admin read or update.
How is M2M priced?
Per successful token request, $0.00225 each in the first tier (the example on the pricing page is 5,000 requests = $11.25).
Do credits cover Cognito?
Yes, all Cognito charges are eligible usage; SNS and SES charges for messages are billed under those services.
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
- The local data names the M2M field pricePerThousandTokenRequests with value 0.00225, but the official page prices $0.00225 per token request. The runway treats it as per request (matching AWS).
- Runway prices come from the calculator repository snapshot rate card cognito (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/pricing/ before publishing.