Amazon EC2 pricing calculator
Compare Instance Types & Costs. 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 EC2 pricing works
What you pay for
- Instance usage per instance type, OS and purchase option (On-Demand, Spot, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, Dedicated Hosts). Linux and Windows On-Demand are billed per second with a 60-second minimum.
- EBS volumes (GB-month, plus provisioned IOPS/throughput for gp3/io1/io2) and EBS snapshots.
- Public IPv4 addresses at $0.005 per IP-hour, whether attached or idle.
- Data transfer: internet egress tiers starting at $0.09/GB in us-east-1, cross-AZ and cross-Region traffic; inbound is free.
- Optional extras: detailed CloudWatch monitoring, Elastic Load Balancing, NAT gateways, licence-included OS or SQL Server.
Common cost traps
- Idle or oversized instances keep billing every second they run; stopped instances stop compute charges but their EBS volumes and public IPv4 addresses keep billing.
- Every public IPv4 address costs $0.005/hour (about $3.65/month), including Elastic IPs that are not attached.
- Private instances that reach the internet through a NAT gateway pay $0.045/hour per gateway plus $0.045 per GB processed, on top of normal egress.
- Cross-AZ traffic between instances is charged $0.01/GB in each direction, which adds up for chatty clusters and replication.
- Burstable T instances launched in unlimited mode can accrue CPU credit surcharges when they run above baseline for long periods.
- Orphaned EBS volumes and old snapshots stay on the bill after instances are terminated.
Ways to reduce cost
- Use Graviton where the software supports Arm: in this data m7g.large is $0.0816/h versus $0.1008/h for m7i.large.
- Cover the steady baseline with a No Upfront Compute Savings Plan or EC2 Instance Savings Plan; credits offset the hourly commitment but never an upfront payment.
- Run fault-tolerant batch, CI and stateless workers on Spot; plan for 2-minute interruption notices.
- Schedule non-production instances off outside working hours with Instance Scheduler or simple EventBridge rules.
- Prefer gp3 over gp2 and right-size from CloudWatch or Compute Optimizer data before buying commitments.
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. Legacy accounts: 750 hours/month of t2.micro or t3.micro (Linux and Windows), 30 GB of EBS, 750 hours of public IPv4 for 12 months. New accounts: Free-plan-eligible types are t3.micro, t3.small, t4g.micro, t4g.small, c7i-flex.large and m7i-flex.large, and their usage is drawn from the Free Tier credits rather than a separate hour allowance. Always free: 100 GB/month of data transfer out to the internet, aggregated across services.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon EC2?
EC2 On-Demand, Spot and the hourly charges of No Upfront Savings Plans or Reserved Instances are eligible usage, so promotional and Activate credits offset them, together with attached EBS volumes, Elastic IP/public IPv4 charges and data transfer. 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
- Software fees of AWS Marketplace AMIs (for example commercial firewalls or licensed OS images bought through Marketplace).
- Licences you bring yourself (BYOL); only the AWS-billed instance and licence-included charges are offset.
- 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 | $51.47 | 194.3 mo. | 485.7 mo. | 1,942.9 mo. |
| Medium | $433.10 | 23.1 mo. | 57.7 mo. | 230.9 mo. |
| Large | $4,553.11 | 2.2 mo. | 5.5 mo. | 22.0 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
2 x t3.small Linux web/app servers 24/7, 30 GB gp3 each, 2 public IPv4 addresses, 100 GB internet egress | t3.small On-Demand: 1,460 instance-hours x $0.0208 = $30.37; gp3 storage: 60 GB-month x $0.08 = $4.80; Public IPv4: 1,460 IP-hours x $0.005 = $7.30; Data transfer out: 100 GB x $0.09 = $9.00 | Total ~$51.47/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
4 x m7i.large 24/7, 100 GB gp3 each, 4 public IPv4, 1 TB internet egress | m7i.large On-Demand: 2,920 instance-hours x $0.1008 = $294.34; gp3 storage: 400 GB-month x $0.08 = $32.00; Public IPv4: 2,920 IP-hours x $0.005 = $14.60; Data transfer out: 1,024 GB x $0.09 = $92.16 | Total ~$433.10/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
12 x m7i.2xlarge 24/7, 250 GB gp3 each, 12 public IPv4, 8 TB internet egress | m7i.2xlarge On-Demand: 8,760 instance-hours x $0.4032 = $3,532.03; gp3 storage: 3,000 GB-month x $0.08 = $240.00; Public IPv4: 8,760 IP-hours x $0.005 = $43.80; Data transfer out: 8,192 GB x $0.09 = $737.28 | Total ~$4,553.11/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon EC2 pricing FAQ
Can Activate credits pay for an EC2 Savings Plan?
Only partly. The hourly commitment of a No Upfront Savings Plan is billed as normal usage and credits offset it. All Upfront payments and the upfront part of Partial Upfront plans are excluded from promotional credits.
Are Spot Instances covered by credits?
Yes. Spot usage is ordinary EC2 usage and is offset by credits like On-Demand usage. Spot prices change over time, so this calculator keeps a snapshot of Spot rates rather than live values.
Why does a stopped instance still cost money?
Stopping ends compute billing, but attached EBS volumes, snapshots and any public IPv4 address continue to bill until you delete or release them.
Does the new Free plan give 750 free hours like before?
No. For accounts created on or after 15 July 2025, eligible small instance types run against your Free Tier credit balance. The 750-hour allowance applies only to accounts created before that date, during their first 12 months.
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
- Spot prices in the calculator are a repository snapshot, not live values; runway uses On-Demand only.