AWS Config pricing calculator
Configuration Items & Rule Evaluations. 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 Config pricing works
What you pay for
- Configuration items: $0.003 per item recorded (continuous) or $0.012 per item (periodic, daily).
- Rule evaluations: tiered $0.001 / $0.0008 / $0.0005 per evaluation (first 100,000, next 400,000, beyond).
- Conformance pack evaluations: same tiers; S3 delivery and SNS notifications billed separately.
Common cost traps
- Recording all resource types in accounts with autoscaling, containers or frequent tag changes creates many configuration items.
- Change-triggered rules evaluate again on every change.
- Org-wide conformance packs multiply evaluations across accounts and Regions.
Ways to reduce cost
- Exclude high-churn resource types or use periodic recording for them.
- Record global resources (IAM) in one Region only.
- Remove duplicate rules that Security Hub controls already create.
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. Config has no free tier on either plan; new-plan accounts can pay from Free Tier credits.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover AWS Config?
Config configuration items, rule evaluations and conformance pack evaluations 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 | $35.00 | 285.7 mo. | 714.3 mo. | 2,857.1 mo. |
| Medium | $660.00 | 15.2 mo. | 37.9 mo. | 151.5 mo. |
| Large | $7,340.00 | 1.4 mo. | 3.4 mo. | 13.6 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
5,000 configuration items (continuous), 20,000 rule evaluations | Configuration items (continuous): 5,000 items x $0.003 = $15.00; Rule evaluations: 20,000 evaluations tiered (20,000 @ $0.001) = $20.00 | Total ~$35.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
100,000 items, 300,000 rule evaluations, 100,000 conformance pack evaluations | Configuration items (continuous): 100,000 items x $0.003 = $300.00; Rule evaluations: 300,000 evaluations tiered (100,000 @ $0.001; 200,000 @ $0.0008) = $260.00; Conformance pack evaluations: 100,000 evaluations tiered (100,000 @ $0.001) = $100.00 | Total ~$660.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
1.5 M items, 3 M rule evaluations, 2 M conformance pack evaluations | Configuration items (continuous): 1,500,000 items x $0.003 = $4,500.00; Rule evaluations: 3,000,000 evaluations tiered (100,000 @ $0.001; 400,000 @ $0.0008; 2,500,000 @ $0.0005) = $1,670.00; Conformance pack evaluations: 2,000,000 evaluations tiered (100,000 @ $0.001; 400,000 @ $0.0008; 1,500,000 @ $0.0005) = $1,170.00 | Total ~$7,340.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
AWS Config pricing FAQ
How is Config priced?
Per configuration item recorded ($0.003 continuous) plus per rule and conformance pack evaluation (from $0.001).
Why is my Config bill high?
Usually high-churn resources (EC2 Auto Scaling, ENIs, tags) recorded continuously.
Is there a free tier?
No.
Do credits cover Config?
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
- Runway prices come from the calculator repository snapshot rate card config (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/config/pricing/ before publishing.