AWS Fargate vs AWS Lambda pricing calculator
Compare Serverless 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 AWS Lambda pricing works
What you pay for
- Lambda: $0.20 per million requests plus GB-seconds of duration, billed per millisecond.
- Fargate: vCPU-hours and GB-hours per task, billed per second with a 1-minute minimum, plus ephemeral storage above 20 GB.
- Both: Compute Savings Plans discounts, Arm/Graviton pricing, data transfer, and the load balancer or API front door you put in front.
Common cost traps
- Comparing on compute only hides the front door: an ALB (about $16/month plus LCUs) for Fargate versus API Gateway per-request fees for Lambda.
- Lambda cost grows linearly with traffic; Fargate costs the same whether a task is busy or idle.
- Fargate tasks in private subnets need NAT or VPC endpoints to pull images and call AWS APIs.
- Per-request work that waits on I/O still bills Lambda GB-seconds for the full wait.
Ways to reduce cost
- Rule of thumb: spiky or low traffic suits Lambda, steady high concurrency suits Fargate. Use this calculator with your own request rate.
- Use Arm on both platforms where possible.
- A Compute Savings Plan covers EC2, Fargate and Lambda, so you can switch later without losing the discount.
- For Fargate, right-size task CPU/memory to actual usage and consider Fargate Spot for interruptible work.
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. Lambda has an always-free allowance (1 M requests and 400,000 GB-seconds per month) on both plans. Fargate has no free allowance; on new accounts it can be paid from Free Tier credits.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover AWS Fargate vs AWS Lambda?
Both Fargate (vCPU-hours, GB-hours, extra ephemeral storage) and Lambda (requests, GB-seconds) are eligible usage, so credits offset whichever you choose, including the hourly part of a No Upfront Compute Savings Plan, which covers 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
- Marketplace container images or software billed through AWS Marketplace.
- 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 | $23.51 | 425.4 mo. | 1,063.4 mo. | 4,253.5 mo. |
| Medium | $425.41 | 23.5 mo. | 58.8 mo. | 235.1 mo. |
| Large | $4,254.14 | 2.4 mo. | 5.9 mo. | 23.5 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
Same API on both: Lambda 10 M requests/month at 512 MB x 150 ms, versus 1 Fargate task 0.25 vCPU / 0.5 GB 24/7 (shown together for comparison) | Lambda requests: 10 million x $0.2 = $2.00; Lambda duration: 750,000 GB-seconds x $0.0000166667 = $12.50; Fargate vCPU: 182.5 vCPU-hours x $0.04048 = $7.39; Fargate memory: 365 GB-hours x $0.004445 = $1.62 | Total ~$23.51/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
Lambda 100 M requests at 1 GB x 200 ms, plus 2 Fargate tasks 1 vCPU / 2 GB 24/7 (both sides summed so the runway reflects running the pair) | Lambda requests: 100 million x $0.2 = $20.00; Lambda duration: 20,000,000 GB-seconds x $0.0000166667 = $333.33; Fargate vCPU: 1,460 vCPU-hours x $0.04048 = $59.10; Fargate memory: 2,920 GB-hours x $0.004445 = $12.98 | Total ~$425.41/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
Lambda 1 B requests at 1 GB x 200 ms, plus 10 Fargate tasks 2 vCPU / 4 GB 24/7 | Lambda requests: 1,000 million x $0.2 = $200.00; Lambda duration: 200,000,000 GB-seconds x $0.0000166667 = $3,333.34; Fargate vCPU: 14,600 vCPU-hours x $0.04048 = $591.01; Fargate memory: 29,200 GB-hours x $0.004445 = $129.79 | Total ~$4,254.14/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
AWS Fargate vs AWS Lambda pricing FAQ
At what traffic level does Fargate become cheaper than Lambda?
There is no single number. It depends on memory size, duration per request and how evenly traffic is spread. Lambda wins when traffic is spiky or low; Fargate wins when tasks stay busy most of the time.
Do credits favour one option?
No. Both are eligible usage and credits offset them the same way.
Does the Lambda free tier change the comparison?
For small workloads yes: up to 1 M requests and 400,000 GB-seconds a month cost nothing on Lambda, while a 24/7 Fargate task always bills.
Why are the runway rows summing both sides?
The runway shows the cost of running both setups together so the totals stay comparable with other services. Use the line items in the assumptions to read each option on its own.
05 · Sources & estimate notes
Content pack dated 2026-10-19. Calculator rates remain their existing snapshots; this content update is not a price refresh.