Amazon Macie pricing calculator
S3 Security & Sensitive Data Discovery. 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 Macie pricing works
What you pay for
- $0.10 per S3 bucket per month for inventory and monitoring (prorated daily).
- $0.01 per 100,000 objects monitored for automated discovery.
- Sensitive data discovery per GB inspected: $1.00 first 50 TB, $0.50 next 450 TB, $0.25 beyond; plus S3 request charges.
Common cost traps
- Targeted jobs on large buckets are billed per GB inspected; a 10 TB bucket costs about $10,000 to scan once.
- Compressed files are inspected at decompressed size.
- Discovery jobs also generate S3 GET and LIST charges.
Ways to reduce cost
- Use automated discovery sampling rather than full targeted jobs.
- Exclude logs, backups and image buckets from discovery.
- Use the default targeted-discovery quota (5 TB per account) as a spend cap.
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. A 30-day free trial covers bucket inventory and automated discovery (up to 150 GB inspected); targeted discovery jobs are not included. The pricing examples show 1 GB per month of automated discovery free. No other always-free allowance.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon Macie?
Macie bucket evaluation, object monitoring and sensitive data discovery are eligible usage and are offset by credits; S3 GET and LIST requests made by discovery jobs bill under S3. 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 | $22.20 | 450.5 mo. | 1,126.1 mo. | 4,504.5 mo. |
| Medium | $830.04 | 12.0 mo. | 30.1 mo. | 120.5 mo. |
| Large | $20,400.77 | 0.5 mo. | 1.2 mo. | 4.9 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
20 buckets, 2 M objects monitored, 20 GB automated discovery | Buckets evaluated: 20 bucket-months x $0.10001 = $2.00; Objects monitored: 20 100k objects x $0.0100375 = $0.20; Data inspected: 20 GB tiered (20 @ $1) = $20.00 | Total ~$22.20/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
200 buckets, 100 M objects, 300 GB automated + 500 GB targeted discovery | Buckets evaluated: 200 bucket-months x $0.10001 = $20.00; Objects monitored: 1,000 100k objects x $0.0100375 = $10.04; Data inspected: 800 GB tiered (800 @ $1) = $800.00 | Total ~$830.04/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
2,000 buckets, 2 B objects, 20 TB inspected | Buckets evaluated: 2,000 bucket-months x $0.10001 = $200.02; Objects monitored: 20,000 100k objects x $0.0100375 = $200.75; Data inspected: 20,000 GB tiered (20,000 @ $1) = $20,000.00 | Total ~$20,400.77/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon Macie pricing FAQ
What does Macie cost for a bucket?
$0.10 per bucket per month, plus object monitoring and per-GB discovery.
Is there a free trial?
Yes, 30 days of bucket monitoring and automated discovery up to 150 GB inspected.
How expensive is discovery?
$1 per GB inspected for the first 50 TB per month.
Do credits cover Macie?
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 macie (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/macie/pricing/ before publishing.