Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) 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 Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) pricing works
What you pay for
- Environment hours by class (mw1.micro $0.29 to mw1.large $0.99/hour in this data), including a base scheduler, worker and web server.
- Additional workers, schedulers and web servers per hour; metadata database storage per GB-month.
- Serverless managed task pricing where available; S3 (DAGs, logs) and CloudWatch Logs billed separately.
Common cost traps
- Environments bill 24/7 even with no DAG runs; a dev environment is at least about $212/month on mw1.micro.
- Max workers set high allows bursts that bill per worker-hour.
- Verbose Airflow task logs in CloudWatch add cost.
Ways to reduce cost
- Share one environment across teams where isolation allows.
- Delete or recreate dev environments instead of leaving them running.
- Set log level to WARNING or INFO and limit max workers.
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 MWAA Free Tier. New-plan accounts can pay from Free Tier credits.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA)?
MWAA environment hours, additional workers, schedulers and web servers, metadata database storage and serverless task 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 | $357.70 | 28.0 mo. | 69.9 mo. | 279.6 mo. |
| Medium | $781.10 | 12.8 mo. | 32.0 mo. | 128.0 mo. |
| Large | $2,365.20 | 4.2 mo. | 10.6 mo. | 42.3 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
mw1.small environment 24/7 | mw1.small environment: 730 hours x $0.49 = $357.70 | Total ~$357.70/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
mw1.medium environment 24/7 with an average of 3 extra workers | mw1.medium environment: 730 hours x $0.74 = $540.20; Extra medium workers: 2,190 worker-hours x $0.11 = $240.90 | Total ~$781.10/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
mw1.large production environment + mw1.small staging, average 8 extra large workers | mw1.large environment: 730 hours x $0.99 = $722.70; Extra large workers: 5,840 worker-hours x $0.22 = $1,284.80; mw1.small staging environment: 730 hours x $0.49 = $357.70 | Total ~$2,365.20/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) pricing FAQ
What is the minimum monthly cost?
An mw1.micro environment is $0.29/hour here, about $212 for a month, before extra workers and storage.
Can I stop an environment?
No pause option is available; you delete and recreate it.
Do credits cover MWAA?
Yes, it is eligible usage.
When is Step Functions better?
For event-driven or low-volume workflows that do not need Airflow, Step Functions bills per transition with no idle cost.
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
- The serverless managed task rate ($0.08 in the data) and its availability should be confirmed.
- Runway prices come from the calculator repository snapshot rate card mwaa (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/managed-workflows-for-apache-airflow/pricing/ before publishing.