AWS Fargate vs Amazon EC2 (ECS) pricing calculator
Compare ECS 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 vs Amazon EC2 (ECS) pricing works
What you pay for
- Fargate: per vCPU-hour and GB-hour of task size, per second.
- EC2: per instance-hour regardless of how many tasks run on it, plus EBS root volumes and any idle headroom.
- Both: Savings Plans, Spot, Arm pricing, load balancers, NAT and data transfer.
Common cost traps
- EC2 looks cheaper per vCPU but needs headroom for scaling and bin-packing waste; at 50% utilisation the gap closes.
- Fargate charges for configured task size even if the container uses a fraction.
- EC2 hosts need patching and AMI management, which is real operational cost.
Ways to reduce cost
- Compare at realistic EC2 utilisation (60-80%), not 100%.
- Use Spot for both where tasks can be interrupted.
- Mix capacity providers: EC2 for steady baseline, Fargate for spikes.
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. Fargate has no Free Tier. EC2 capacity can use the legacy 750-hour allowance (t2/t3.micro) or Free Tier credits on new accounts.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover AWS Fargate vs Amazon EC2 (ECS)?
Both Fargate and EC2 capacity for ECS are eligible usage and are offset by credits; a No Upfront Compute Savings Plan applies to both. 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 | $96.61 | 103.5 mo. | 258.8 mo. | 1,035.1 mo. |
| Medium | $1,435.62 | 7.0 mo. | 17.4 mo. | 69.7 mo. |
| Large | $5,742.47 | 1.7 mo. | 4.4 mo. | 17.4 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
Same workload both ways: 4 tasks x 0.5 vCPU / 1 GB on Fargate, versus 1 x t4g.medium EC2 host (both shown, summed) | Fargate vCPU-hours: 1,460 vCPU-hours x $0.04048 = $59.10; Fargate GB-hours: 2,920 GB-hours x $0.004445 = $12.98; EC2 t4g.medium: 730 instance-hours x $0.0336 = $24.53 | Total ~$96.61/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
20 tasks x 1 vCPU / 2 GB on Fargate, versus 12 x m7g.large EC2 hosts (both summed) | Fargate vCPU-hours: 14,600 vCPU-hours x $0.04048 = $591.01; Fargate GB-hours: 29,200 GB-hours x $0.004445 = $129.79; EC2 m7g.large: 8,760 instance-hours x $0.0816 = $714.82 | Total ~$1,435.62/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
80 tasks x 1 vCPU / 2 GB on Fargate, versus 24 x m7g.xlarge EC2 hosts (both summed) | Fargate vCPU-hours: 58,400 vCPU-hours x $0.04048 = $2,364.03; Fargate GB-hours: 116,800 GB-hours x $0.004445 = $519.18; EC2 m7g.xlarge: 17,520 instance-hours x $0.1632 = $2,859.26 | Total ~$5,742.47/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
AWS Fargate vs Amazon EC2 (ECS) pricing FAQ
Which is cheaper?
EC2 is usually cheaper per vCPU when hosts stay well packed; Fargate is often cheaper for small, spiky or low-utilisation services because you do not pay for idle hosts.
Why are both options summed in the runway?
So the totals are comparable with other services. Read the line items to see each option on its own.
Do Savings Plans cover both?
Compute Savings Plans apply to EC2 and Fargate (and Lambda).
Do credits cover both?
Yes, both are 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.