AWS Lambda pricing calculator
Savings Plans & Provisioned Concurrency. 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 Lambda pricing works
What you pay for
- Requests at $0.20 per million.
- Duration in GB-seconds (memory x time, billed per millisecond); Arm (Graviton) is about 20% cheaper per GB-second than x86.
- Provisioned concurrency: an hourly-style charge for kept-warm capacity plus a lower duration rate.
- Ephemeral storage above the free 512 MB, billed per GB-second.
- Data transfer out to the internet and to other Regions; Lambda@Edge is priced separately under CloudFront.
Common cost traps
- Functions in a VPC that call the internet need a NAT gateway ($0.045/hour plus $0.045/GB), which can cost more than the functions.
- CloudWatch Logs ingestion ($0.50/GB) is often larger than the Lambda bill for verbose functions.
- Over-allocating memory multiplies GB-seconds; under-allocating lengthens duration. Both raise cost.
- Provisioned concurrency bills for every configured hour, even when no requests arrive.
- Retries from async invocations, stream sources or failing SQS batches multiply request and duration charges.
Ways to reduce cost
- Tune memory with AWS Lambda Power Tuning and pick the cheapest point on the cost/duration curve.
- Move compatible functions to Arm/Graviton for a lower GB-second rate.
- Use VPC endpoints instead of NAT for AWS service calls from VPC-attached functions.
- Set log retention and log levels; batch SQS/Kinesis records to cut invocations.
- For steady high volume, compare a Compute Savings Plan or Fargate before scaling up.
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: 1 million requests and 400,000 GB-seconds of compute per month. Provisioned concurrency is not part of the free allowance.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover AWS Lambda?
Lambda requests, duration (GB-seconds), provisioned concurrency, ephemeral storage and the hourly part of Compute Savings Plans are eligible usage and are offset by promotional and Activate 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
- Charges from services a function calls (for example Bedrock third-party models via Marketplace) follow the rules of those services.
- 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 | $9.33 | 1,071.8 mo. | 2,679.5 mo. | 10,718.1 mo. |
| Medium | $312.00 | 32.1 mo. | 80.1 mo. | 320.5 mo. |
| Large | $3,120.01 | 3.2 mo. | 8.0 mo. | 32.1 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
API backend: 5 M requests/month, 512 MB x86, 200 ms average | Requests: 5 million x $0.2 = $1.00; Duration: 500,000 GB-seconds x $0.0000166667 = $8.33 | Total ~$9.33/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
Event processing: 60 M requests/month, 1,024 MB x86, 300 ms average | Requests: 60 million x $0.2 = $12.00; Duration: 18,000,000 GB-seconds x $0.0000166667 = $300.00 | Total ~$312.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
High-volume API: 600 M requests/month, 1,536 MB Arm, 250 ms average, on-demand (no provisioned concurrency) | Requests: 600 million x $0.2 = $120.00; Duration (Arm): 225,000,000 GB-seconds x $0.0000133334 = $3,000.01 | Total ~$3,120.01/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
AWS Lambda pricing FAQ
Does the Lambda free tier stack with Activate credits?
Yes. The always-free 1 M requests and 400,000 GB-seconds are applied first; credits then offset the remaining charges.
Is Arm always cheaper?
Per GB-second, yes (here $0.0000133334 versus $0.0000166667 for x86). Total cost also depends on whether your code runs as fast on Arm, so test first.
Are Lambda Savings Plans worth it?
Compute Savings Plans cut the Lambda duration rate (here from $0.0000166667 to $0.0000147 per GB-second for x86 on a 1-year plan). Choose No Upfront if you want credits to keep covering the commitment.
Why is my Lambda bill small but my AWS bill large?
Look at NAT gateway processing, CloudWatch Logs and data transfer. These are billed to other services and often exceed the Lambda line.
05 · Sources & estimate notes
Content pack dated 2026-10-19. Calculator rates remain their existing snapshots; this content update is not a price refresh.