Amazon MQ pricing calculator
ActiveMQ & RabbitMQ. 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 MQ pricing works
What you pay for
- Broker instance hours by engine, size and deployment (single-instance, active/standby for ActiveMQ, 3-node cluster for RabbitMQ).
- Broker storage per GB-month (EFS-backed $0.30, EBS-backed $0.10 for ActiveMQ; RabbitMQ uses EBS).
- Data transfer across AZs and out of the Region.
Common cost traps
- Active/standby and cluster deployments bill two or three instances.
- Brokers bill every hour even when idle; there is no scale-to-zero.
- EFS-backed ActiveMQ storage is three times the EBS rate.
Ways to reduce cost
- Use single-instance brokers for dev/test.
- For new designs without JMS/AMQP requirements, compare SQS/SNS, which are billed per request.
- Use Graviton (m7g) RabbitMQ instances.
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 of a single-instance mq.t2.micro or mq.t3.micro ActiveMQ broker and 5 GB of storage per month for 12 months. New-plan accounts pay from Free Tier credits.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon MQ?
Amazon MQ broker hours (ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ), broker storage and data transfer 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 | $21.24 | 470.8 mo. | 1,177.0 mo. | 4,708.1 mo. |
| Medium | $608.67 | 16.4 mo. | 41.1 mo. | 164.3 mo. |
| Large | $3,513.84 | 2.8 mo. | 7.1 mo. | 28.5 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
ActiveMQ mq.t3.micro single-instance broker 24/7, 5 GB EFS storage | mq.t3.micro single-instance: 730 hours x $0.02704 = $19.74; Storage (EFS): 5 GB-month x $0.3 = $1.50 | Total ~$21.24/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
RabbitMQ mq.m7g.large 3-node cluster 24/7, 100 GB EBS storage | mq.m7g.large cluster: 730 hours x $0.8201 = $598.67; Storage (EBS): 100 GB-month x $0.1 = $10.00 | Total ~$608.67/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
2 ActiveMQ mq.m5.2xlarge active/standby brokers, 500 GB EFS storage | mq.m5.2xlarge active/standby: 1,460 hours x $2.304 = $3,363.84; Storage (EFS): 500 GB-month x $0.3 = $150.00 | Total ~$3,513.84/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon MQ pricing FAQ
Why use Amazon MQ instead of SQS?
For existing applications that speak JMS, AMQP, MQTT, STOMP or OpenWire and need a broker without code changes.
Does a cluster cost three times a single instance?
Roughly: an mq.m7g.large RabbitMQ cluster is $0.8201/hour versus $0.2734 for one instance here.
Is there a free tier?
Only on legacy accounts (750 hours of a micro ActiveMQ broker for 12 months).
Do credits cover Amazon MQ?
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
- Only data-transfer tiers of amazonmq were refreshed from the AWS Price List; service rates are the repository snapshot. Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-mq/pricing/.