AWS Step Functions pricing calculator
Standard vs Express Cost Estimator. 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 Step Functions pricing works
What you pay for
- Standard workflows: $0.025 per 1,000 state transitions (including retries).
- Express workflows: $1.00 per million requests plus duration per GB-second (tiered, 64 MB minimum memory, 100 ms increments).
- Services called by tasks (Lambda, ECS, Bedrock, DynamoDB) and CloudWatch Logs are billed separately.
Common cost traps
- Retries and Map state iterations each count as state transitions.
- Polling loops (Wait + Choice) in Standard workflows burn transitions; use .sync or callback integrations instead.
- Express logging at ALL level writes to CloudWatch Logs for every execution.
Ways to reduce cost
- Use Express workflows for high-volume, short (under 5 minutes) idempotent work.
- Use direct SDK integrations instead of Lambda glue functions.
- Combine trivial Pass states and avoid polling loops.
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: 4,000 Standard state transitions per month. Express workflows have no free allowance.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover AWS Step Functions?
Step Functions Standard state transitions and Express workflow requests and duration 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 | $12.50 | 800.0 mo. | 2,000.0 mo. | 8,000.0 mo. |
| Medium | $640.84 | 15.6 mo. | 39.0 mo. | 156.0 mo. |
| Large | $4,632.88 | 2.2 mo. | 5.4 mo. | 21.6 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
Standard workflows: 50,000 executions x 10 transitions | State transitions: 500,000 transitions x $0.000025 = $12.50 | Total ~$12.50/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
Standard 2 M executions x 12 transitions, plus Express 20 M requests at 64 MB x 1 s | State transitions: 24,000,000 transitions x $0.000025 = $600.00; Express requests: 20 million x $1 = $20.00; Express duration: 1,250,000 GB-seconds tiered (1,250,000 @ $0.00001667) = $20.84 | Total ~$640.84/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
Standard 10 M executions x 15 transitions, Express 500 M requests at 64 MB x 2 s | State transitions: 150,000,000 transitions x $0.000025 = $3,750.00; Express requests: 500 million x $1 = $500.00; Express duration: 62,500,000 GB-seconds tiered (3,600,000 @ $0.00001667; 14,400,000 @ $0.00000833; 44,500,000 @ $0.00000456) = $382.88 | Total ~$4,632.88/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
AWS Step Functions pricing FAQ
Standard or Express?
Standard is billed per state transition and suits long-running, auditable workflows. Express is billed per request and duration and suits high-volume, short workflows.
Do retries cost extra?
Yes. Each retry is a state transition in Standard workflows.
Is there a free tier?
4,000 Standard state transitions per month, always free on both plans.
Do credits cover Step Functions?
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.