AWS CodeBuild pricing calculator
EC2, Lambda, Docker & Sandbox. 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 CodeBuild pricing works
What you pay for
- On-demand EC2 compute per build minute by OS and size (Linux small $0.005, medium $0.01, large $0.02 in us-east-1), rounded up to the minute.
- Lambda compute per second by memory size and architecture.
- Reserved capacity fleets billed per minute while provisioned; S3 artifacts, CloudWatch Logs and data transfer billed separately.
Common cost traps
- Large or GPU build types bill 4-60x small builds per minute.
- Slow dependency downloads count as build minutes; builds in a VPC pull through NAT.
- Reserved capacity fleets bill while running, even with no builds queued.
Ways to reduce cost
- Cache dependencies (local or S3 cache) and use smaller compute where builds are I/O bound.
- Use Arm build images, which are cheaper per minute.
- Use Lambda compute for short builds.
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 both plans: 100 build minutes per month of general1.small (Linux EC2) or arm1.small, per the CodeBuild pricing page.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover AWS CodeBuild?
CodeBuild on-demand build minutes (EC2 and Lambda compute), reserved capacity fleets and related storage/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 | $15.00 | 666.7 mo. | 1,666.7 mo. | 6,666.7 mo. |
| Medium | $235.00 | 42.6 mo. | 106.4 mo. | 425.5 mo. |
| Large | $2,610.00 | 3.8 mo. | 9.6 mo. | 38.3 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
3,000 build minutes/month on Linux small (EC2) | Linux small build minutes: 3,000 minutes x $0.005 = $15.00 | Total ~$15.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
20,000 minutes Linux medium + 5,000 minutes Arm medium | Linux medium: 20,000 minutes x $0.01 = $200.00; Arm medium: 5,000 minutes x $0.007 = $35.00 | Total ~$235.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
100,000 minutes Linux large, 10,000 Windows large, 5,000 GPU small | Linux large: 100,000 minutes x $0.02 = $2,000.00; Windows large: 10,000 minutes x $0.036 = $360.00; GPU small: 5,000 minutes x $0.05 = $250.00 | Total ~$2,610.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
AWS CodeBuild pricing FAQ
How are build minutes rounded?
On EC2 compute, each build is billed per minute, rounded up.
Is there a free tier?
100 build minutes per month on general1.small (or arm1.small), on all plans.
Is Arm cheaper?
Yes. Arm medium is $0.007 per minute versus $0.01 for Linux x86 medium in this data.
Do credits cover CodeBuild?
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
- The always-free 100 minutes applying to both plans should be confirmed for accounts on the new Free plan.
- Runway prices come from the calculator repository snapshot rate card codebuild (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/codebuild/pricing/ before publishing.