Amazon OpenSearch Service pricing calculator
Instance & Serverless 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 OpenSearch Service pricing works
What you pay for
- Managed domains: instance hours per node type (data, dedicated master, UltraWarm), EBS storage per GB-month (gp3 $0.122), provisioned IOPS/throughput, cold storage in S3.
- Serverless: indexing and search OCU-hours ($0.24 each) plus managed storage; minimum OCUs apply per account.
- Snapshots to S3, data transfer, OpenSearch Ingestion OCUs, direct queries on S3.
Common cost traps
- Domains bill 24/7; three-AZ production setups triple node counts.
- Serverless has a minimum OCU charge even for a tiny collection.
- Over-sharding and large replica counts increase storage and node needs.
- Long retention on hot EBS storage is expensive compared with UltraWarm or cold storage.
Ways to reduce cost
- Use Graviton (r7g/m7g/or1) instances and gp3.
- Move older indices to UltraWarm/cold storage with Index State Management.
- Buy No Upfront reserved instances for steady domains.
- For low-traffic dev, use a single small node or a serverless collection without standby replicas.
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 per month of t2.small or t3.small.search and 10 GB of EBS storage for 12 months. New-plan accounts pay from Free Tier credits.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon OpenSearch Service?
OpenSearch Service domain instance hours (and the hourly part of No Upfront reserved instances), EBS storage, UltraWarm and cold storage, and OpenSearch Serverless OCUs and storage 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 | $59.39 | 168.4 mo. | 420.9 mo. | 1,683.8 mo. |
| Medium | $572.82 | 17.5 mo. | 43.6 mo. | 174.6 mo. |
| Large | $3,354.07 | 3.0 mo. | 7.5 mo. | 29.8 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
1 x t3.medium.search, 50 GB gp3 | t3.medium.search: 730 hours x $0.073 = $53.29; gp3 storage: 50 GB-month x $0.122 = $6.10 | Total ~$59.39/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
3 x r7g.large.search data nodes, 500 GB gp3 each | r7g.large.search: 2,190 hours x $0.178 = $389.82; gp3 storage: 1,500 GB-month x $0.122 = $183.00 | Total ~$572.82/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
6 x r7g.xlarge.search data nodes, 3 x m7g.large.search masters, 2 TB gp3 each data node | r7g.xlarge.search: 4,380 hours x $0.356 = $1,559.28; m7g.large.search masters: 2,190 hours x $0.135 = $295.65; gp3 storage: 12,288 GB-month x $0.122 = $1,499.14 | Total ~$3,354.07/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon OpenSearch Service pricing FAQ
How is a managed domain billed?
By instance hours for every node plus EBS storage. Three r7g.large.search nodes with 500 GB each are about $573/month here.
What does OpenSearch Serverless cost at minimum?
There is a minimum number of OCUs (indexing and search) billed per hour once you have a collection; check the current minimum and whether standby replicas are enabled.
Do credits cover OpenSearch?
Yes, it is eligible usage.
Is there a free tier?
Legacy accounts get 750 hours of a small instance for 12 months.
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 snapshot lists OpenSearch Serverless storage as 17.52 per GB-month, which looks like an hourly rate multiplied by 730 (published rate is about $0.024 per GB-month); it was not used. Fix the source data.
- Serverless minimum OCU rules (with and without standby replicas) should be confirmed.
- Runway prices come from the calculator repository snapshot rate card opensearch (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/opensearch-service/pricing/ before publishing.