Amazon Kendra pricing calculator
GenAI, Enterprise, and Developer Index 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 Kendra pricing works
What you pay for
- Index hours by edition: GenAI Enterprise $0.32/hour, Basic Enterprise $1.40/hour, Developer $1.125/hour (us-east-1), each with base storage and query capacity.
- Additional storage units and query units per hour.
- Connectors: GenAI flat $30 per index per month (with included sync hours); Basic editions per sync hour and per million documents scanned.
Common cost traps
- Indexes bill every hour from creation until deletion; there is no pause.
- Developer Edition is not meant for production but still costs about $821/month if left running.
- Frequent full connector syncs add sync-hour and document-scan charges.
Ways to reduce cost
- Use the GenAI Enterprise index for RAG; it is the cheapest base rate here.
- Delete test indexes and schedule incremental syncs.
- Compare with Bedrock Knowledge Bases plus a vector store for small corpora.
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: Developer Edition free for 750 hours during the first 30 days. New-plan accounts pay from Free Tier credits.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon Kendra?
Kendra index hours (GenAI Enterprise, Enterprise and Developer editions), extra storage and query units, and connector usage 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 | $263.60 | 37.9 mo. | 94.8 mo. | 379.4 mo. |
| Medium | $1,095.80 | 9.1 mo. | 22.8 mo. | 91.3 mo. |
| Large | $5,180.00 | 1.9 mo. | 4.8 mo. | 19.3 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
1 GenAI Enterprise index with base capacity 24/7, 1 connector | GenAI index base: 730 hours x $0.32 = $233.60; Connector (flat): 1 index-month x $30 = $30.00 | Total ~$263.60/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
GenAI Enterprise index with 4 extra storage units and 2 extra query units, 1 connector | GenAI index base: 730 hours x $0.32 = $233.60; Extra storage units: 2,920 unit-hours x $0.25 = $730.00; Extra query units: 1,460 unit-hours x $0.07 = $102.20; Connector (flat): 1 index-month x $30 = $30.00 | Total ~$1,095.80/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
2 Basic Enterprise indexes with 3 extra storage units each, 200 sync hours | Enterprise index base: 1,460 hours x $1.4 = $2,044.00; Extra storage units: 4,380 unit-hours x $0.7 = $3,066.00; Connector sync hours: 200 hours x $0.35 = $70.00 | Total ~$5,180.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon Kendra pricing FAQ
Can I pause a Kendra index?
No. Indexes bill per hour until deleted.
Which edition should I choose?
GenAI Enterprise for retrieval-augmented generation and most new projects; Basic Enterprise for classic enterprise search; Developer only for testing.
How are connectors billed?
GenAI Enterprise connectors cost a flat $30 per index per month; Basic editions bill per sync hour and per million documents scanned.
Do credits cover Kendra?
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 kendra (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/kendra/pricing/ before publishing.