AWS Fargate pricing calculator
Serverless Container 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 Fargate pricing works
What you pay for
- Per vCPU-hour and per GB-hour of task size, billed per second with a 1-minute minimum (Windows: 15-minute minimum plus an OS licence fee per vCPU-hour).
- Arm/Graviton about 20% cheaper; Fargate Spot discounted for interruptible ECS tasks; Compute Savings Plans.
- Ephemeral storage above the included 20 GB per task; data transfer, load balancers and NAT billed separately.
Common cost traps
- You pay for the requested task size, not actual usage, so over-sized task definitions waste money.
- Tasks in private subnets pull images through NAT unless you add VPC endpoints.
- Windows tasks have a 15-minute minimum and licence fees.
- Always-on low-traffic services can cost more than a small EC2 instance or Lambda.
Ways to reduce cost
- Right-size task CPU/memory from CloudWatch metrics.
- Use Arm images and Fargate Spot for workers and batch.
- Cover steady usage with a No Upfront Compute Savings Plan.
- Scale services to zero or use scheduled scaling for non-production.
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. No Fargate Free Tier on any plan; new-plan accounts can pay from Free Tier credits.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover AWS Fargate?
Fargate vCPU-hours, GB-hours, extra ephemeral storage, Windows OS licence fees, Fargate Spot and the hourly part of No Upfront Compute Savings Plans 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 | $36.04 | 277.5 mo. | 693.7 mo. | 2,774.7 mo. |
| Medium | $312.66 | 32.0 mo. | 80.0 mo. | 319.8 mo. |
| Large | $2,306.57 | 4.3 mo. | 10.8 mo. | 43.4 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
2 tasks x 0.5 vCPU / 1 GB, Linux x86, 24/7 | vCPU-hours: 730 vCPU-hours x $0.04048 = $29.55; GB-hours: 1,460 GB-hours x $0.004445 = $6.49 | Total ~$36.04/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
10 tasks x 1 vCPU / 2 GB on Arm 24/7, 30 GB extra ephemeral storage per task | vCPU-hours (Arm): 7,300 vCPU-hours x $0.03238 = $236.37; GB-hours (Arm): 14,600 GB-hours x $0.00356 = $51.98; Extra ephemeral storage: 219,000 GB-hours x $0.000111 = $24.31 | Total ~$312.66/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
40 tasks x 2 vCPU / 4 GB x86 24/7 on a 1-year Compute Savings Plan rate | vCPU-hours (Savings Plan): 58,400 vCPU-hours x $0.032384 = $1,891.23; GB-hours (Savings Plan): 116,800 GB-hours x $0.003556 = $415.34 | Total ~$2,306.57/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
AWS Fargate pricing FAQ
How is a Fargate task billed?
Per second for the vCPU and memory configured in the task definition, from image pull start until the task stops, with a 1-minute minimum on Linux.
Is Arm cheaper?
Yes. In us-east-1 Arm is $0.03238 per vCPU-hour versus $0.04048 for x86 in this data.
Is ephemeral storage free?
The first 20 GB per task is included; more is billed per GB-hour.
Do credits cover Fargate Spot and Savings Plans?
Spot usage, yes. For Savings Plans, the No Upfront hourly commitment is covered; upfront payments are not.
05 · Sources & estimate notes
Content pack dated 2026-10-19. Calculator rates remain their existing snapshots; this content update is not a price refresh.