Amazon Kinesis Data Streams pricing calculator
. 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 Kinesis Data Streams pricing works
What you pay for
- Provisioned: $0.015 per shard-hour plus $0.014 per million PUT payload units (25 KB each).
- On-demand: $0.04 per stream-hour plus $0.08/GB in and $0.04/GB out (Standard); an Advantage mode with lower per-GB rates exists.
- Extended retention (beyond 24 hours, up to 7 days) and long-term retention per GB-month; enhanced fan-out per consumer-shard-hour and per GB.
Common cost traps
- Over-provisioned shards bill 24/7.
- Small records are rounded up to 25 KB PUT payload units in provisioned mode.
- Enhanced fan-out consumers bill per shard-hour each.
- On-demand mode is convenient but costs more than well-sized provisioned shards for steady traffic.
Ways to reduce cost
- Aggregate records (KPL) to fill 25 KB payload units.
- Switch steady streams to provisioned mode and scale shards to measured throughput.
- Use the default 24-hour retention unless consumers need replay.
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. No Kinesis Data Streams Free Tier. New-plan accounts can pay from Free Tier credits.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon Kinesis Data Streams?
Kinesis Data Streams shard-hours, PUT payload units, on-demand stream-hours and data in/out, extended and long-term retention, and enhanced fan-out 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 | $22.60 | 442.5 mo. | 1,106.2 mo. | 4,424.8 mo. |
| Medium | $356.88 | 28.0 mo. | 70.1 mo. | 280.2 mo. |
| Large | $5,980.00 | 1.7 mo. | 4.2 mo. | 16.7 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
Provisioned: 2 shards 24/7, 50 M PUT payload units | Shard-hours: 1,460 shard-hours x $0.015 = $21.90; PUT payload units: 50,000,000 units x $0.000000014 = $0.70 | Total ~$22.60/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
On-demand stream 24/7, 2 TB in, 4 TB out | Stream-hours: 730 stream-hours x $0.04 = $29.20; Data in: 2,048 GB x $0.08 = $163.84; Data out: 4,096 GB x $0.04 = $163.84 | Total ~$356.88/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
Provisioned: 100 shards 24/7, 10 B PUT units, 3 enhanced fan-out consumers, 7-day retention | Shard-hours: 73,000 shard-hours x $0.015 = $1,095.00; PUT payload units: 10,000,000,000 units x $0.000000014 = $140.00; Enhanced fan-out consumer-shard-hours: 219,000 hours x $0.015 = $3,285.00; Extended retention shard-hours: 73,000 shard-hours x $0.02 = $1,460.00 | Total ~$5,980.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams pricing FAQ
On-demand or provisioned?
On-demand needs no capacity planning but costs more per GB; provisioned is cheaper for predictable throughput.
What is a PUT payload unit?
A 25 KB chunk of a record. A 1 KB record still uses one unit.
Is there a free tier?
No.
Do credits cover Kinesis?
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 kinesis (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/data-streams/pricing/ before publishing.