AWS CloudTrail pricing calculator
Trails, Lake & Insights Costs. 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 CloudTrail pricing works
What you pay for
- First copy of management events per Region to S3: free. Additional copies: $2 per 100,000 events.
- Data events and network activity events: $0.10 per 100,000.
- Insights: $0.35 per 100,000 management events analyzed.
- CloudTrail Lake: ingestion per GB (one-year extendable pricing $0.75/GB for CloudTrail events, $0.50 for other sources), extended retention $0.023/GB-month, queries $0.005/GB scanned.
Common cost traps
- A second trail with management events (often created by tooling) is billed per event.
- S3 or Lambda data events on busy buckets can mean billions of events.
- Delivering to CloudWatch Logs adds ingestion charges.
Ways to reduce cost
- Keep one organization trail for management events.
- Use advanced event selectors to log only the data events you need.
- Query with Athena on S3 logs if CloudTrail Lake costs too much.
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. Always free on every plan: 90-day event history and one trail delivering management events per Region to S3 (S3 storage is billed by S3).
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover AWS CloudTrail?
CloudTrail paid event delivery, Insights, CloudTrail Lake ingestion, retention and queries are eligible usage and are offset by credits; S3 and CloudWatch Logs storage bill under those services. 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 | $50.00 | 200.0 mo. | 500.0 mo. | 2,000.0 mo. |
| Medium | $750.00 | 13.3 mo. | 33.3 mo. | 133.3 mo. |
| Large | $6,600.00 | 1.5 mo. | 3.8 mo. | 15.2 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
1 extra trail copy of 2 M management events, 10 M S3 data events | Additional management event copies: 20 100k events x $2 = $40.00; Data events: 100 100k events x $0.1 = $10.00 | Total ~$50.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
500 M data events, Insights on 50 M management events, CloudTrail Lake 100 GB | Data events: 5,000 100k events x $0.1 = $500.00; Insights on management events: 500 100k events x $0.35 = $175.00; CloudTrail Lake ingestion (1-year): 100 GB x $0.75 = $75.00 | Total ~$750.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
5 B data events, CloudTrail Lake 2 TB, 20 TB scanned by queries | Data events: 50,000 100k events x $0.1 = $5,000.00; CloudTrail Lake ingestion (1-year): 2,000 GB x $0.75 = $1,500.00; Lake queries: 20,000 GB scanned x $0.005 = $100.00 | Total ~$6,600.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
AWS CloudTrail pricing FAQ
Is CloudTrail free?
Event history and the first trail copy of management events per Region are free. Extra copies, data events, Insights and Lake are charged.
What do data events cost?
$0.10 per 100,000 events.
Do credits cover CloudTrail?
Yes, it is eligible usage.
Why do I pay for management events?
Usually because a second trail also records them; only the first copy is free.
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 cloudtrail (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/cloudtrail/pricing/ before publishing.