Amazon DynamoDB pricing calculator
On-Demand vs Provisioned Cost Estimator. 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 DynamoDB pricing works
What you pay for
- Throughput: on-demand ($0.625 per million write units, $0.125 per million read units) or provisioned WCU/RCU per hour; Standard-IA tables have higher request and lower storage prices.
- Storage per GB-month ($0.25 Standard, $0.10 Standard-IA after the free 25 GB).
- PITR, on-demand backup, restore, export/import to S3, Streams reads, Kinesis CDC.
- Global tables replicated writes, DAX nodes and data transfer.
Common cost traps
- Items over 1 KB use multiple write units per write (4 KB per read unit), so large items multiply cost.
- Every global secondary index stores data and consumes write capacity on each base-table write.
- Global tables bill replicated writes in every Region.
- Scans read the whole table and burn read units quickly.
- PITR is billed on the full table size, not on changes.
Ways to reduce cost
- Use on-demand for new or spiky tables, provisioned with auto scaling once traffic is predictable.
- Move rarely read tables to Standard-IA.
- Keep items small, project only needed attributes into GSIs, and use TTL to delete expired data at no write cost.
- Use eventually consistent reads (half the cost of strongly consistent).
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: 25 GB of storage, 25 provisioned WCU and 25 provisioned RCU (enough for about 200 M requests a month), 2.5 M Streams read requests. On-demand capacity is not part of the always-free allowance.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon DynamoDB?
DynamoDB on-demand and provisioned throughput, storage, backups, PITR, global table replication, Streams, exports/imports and DAX are eligible usage and are offset by credits; the hourly fee of No Upfront reserved capacity is covered, upfront fees are not. 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 fees for DynamoDB reserved capacity.
- 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 | $15.00 | 666.7 mo. | 1,666.7 mo. | 6,666.7 mo. |
| Medium | $465.00 | 21.5 mo. | 53.8 mo. | 215.1 mo. |
| Large | $2,819.60 | 3.5 mo. | 8.9 mo. | 35.5 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
On-demand: 10 M writes, 50 M reads per month, 10 GB stored | Write request units: 10 million x $0.625 = $6.25; Read request units: 50 million x $0.125 = $6.25; Storage: 10 GB-month x $0.25 = $2.50 | Total ~$15.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
On-demand: 300 M writes, 1.5 B reads, 200 GB stored, PITR on | Write request units: 300 million x $0.625 = $187.50; Read request units: 1,500 million x $0.125 = $187.50; Storage: 200 GB-month x $0.25 = $50.00; PITR: 200 GB-month x $0.2 = $40.00 | Total ~$465.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
Provisioned 2,000 WCU and 10,000 RCU 24/7, 2 TB stored, PITR on | Provisioned WCU: 1,460,000 WCU-hours x $0.00065 = $949.00; Provisioned RCU: 7,300,000 RCU-hours x $0.00013 = $949.00; Storage: 2,048 GB-month x $0.25 = $512.00; PITR: 2,048 GB-month x $0.2 = $409.60 | Total ~$2,819.60/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon DynamoDB pricing FAQ
On-demand or provisioned?
On-demand needs no planning and suits spiky or unknown traffic. Provisioned with auto scaling is usually cheaper for steady traffic. You can switch a table between modes (limited number of times per day).
Is the 25 GB free forever?
Yes. It is an always-free offer on both the new and legacy plans, along with 25 WCU and 25 RCU of provisioned capacity.
Why is my write bill higher than expected?
Large items, GSIs, global tables and transactional writes (which cost two units) all multiply write units.
Do credits cover DynamoDB reserved capacity?
The ongoing hourly charge, yes; any upfront payment, no.
05 · Sources & estimate notes
Content pack dated 2026-10-19. Calculator rates remain their existing snapshots; this content update is not a price refresh.