AWS CloudHSM pricing calculator
HSM Cluster 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 AWS CloudHSM pricing works
What you pay for
- Per HSM-hour from creation until deletion: hsm2m.medium $1.60/hour in us-east-1 (legacy hsm1.medium $1.88).
- No upfront fee; backups to S3 are free per AWS, cross-Region copies incur data transfer.
Common cost traps
- HSMs bill every hour they exist; there is no stop state.
- AWS recommends at least two HSMs in different AZs for production.
- KMS custom key stores require an active CloudHSM cluster.
Ways to reduce cost
- Use KMS with AWS-owned HSMs unless you need single-tenant HSMs.
- Delete dev clusters and restore from backup when needed.
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. CloudHSM has no free tier on either plan; new-plan accounts can pay from Free Tier credits but one HSM (~$1,168/month) would exhaust $200 in under a week.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover AWS CloudHSM?
CloudHSM HSM hours 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 | $1,168.00 | 8.6 mo. | 21.4 mo. | 85.6 mo. |
| Medium | $2,336.00 | 4.3 mo. | 10.7 mo. | 42.8 mo. |
| Large | $7,008.00 | 1.4 mo. | 3.6 mo. | 14.3 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
1 hsm2m.medium HSM 24/7 (dev/test, no HA) | hsm2m.medium: 730 HSM-hours x $1.6 = $1,168.00 | Total ~$1,168.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
2 hsm2m.medium HSMs 24/7 (production HA minimum) | hsm2m.medium: 1,460 HSM-hours x $1.6 = $2,336.00 | Total ~$2,336.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
6 HSMs 24/7 (3 per cluster in 2 Regions) | hsm2m.medium: 4,380 HSM-hours x $1.6 = $7,008.00 | Total ~$7,008.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
AWS CloudHSM pricing FAQ
What does an HSM cost?
$1.60 per hour for hsm2m.medium in us-east-1, about $1,168 per month.
How many HSMs do I need?
One for testing; at least two in different AZs for production availability.
Do credits cover CloudHSM?
Yes, it is eligible usage.
Can I stop an HSM?
No. You delete it and restore from backup later.
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 cloudhsm (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/cloudhsm/pricing/ before publishing.