AWS Transfer Family pricing calculator
SFTP, AS2 & Connectors. 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 Transfer Family pricing works
What you pay for
- Endpoint hours per enabled protocol ($0.30/hour per protocol in us-east-1), from creation until deletion.
- Data uploaded and downloaded over SFTP/FTPS/FTP ($0.04/GB each way); AS2 messages, SFTP connectors and web apps are priced separately.
- Underlying S3 or EFS storage and requests, and internet egress for downloads.
Common cost traps
- An endpoint bills about $219/month per protocol even with no traffic; stopping the server does not stop the charge, only deleting it does.
- Enabling several protocols on one server bills each protocol separately.
- Downloads also incur standard data transfer out charges on top of the $0.04/GB.
Ways to reduce cost
- Delete test endpoints instead of stopping them.
- Consolidate partners on one endpoint per protocol.
- For internal transfers, consider direct S3 access (signed URLs, DataSync) instead of SFTP.
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 Transfer Family Free Tier; new-plan accounts can pay from Free Tier credits.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover AWS Transfer Family?
Transfer Family endpoint hours, per-GB upload/download, connectors, web apps and AS2 messages 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 | $225.00 | 44.4 mo. | 111.1 mo. | 444.4 mo. |
| Medium | $560.88 | 17.8 mo. | 44.6 mo. | 178.3 mo. |
| Large | $2,104.80 | 4.8 mo. | 11.9 mo. | 47.5 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
1 SFTP endpoint 24/7, 100 GB uploaded and 50 GB downloaded | SFTP endpoint: 730 hours x $0.3 = $219.00; Uploads: 100 GB x $0.04 = $4.00; Downloads: 50 GB x $0.04 = $2.00 | Total ~$225.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
2 SFTP endpoints 24/7 (prod + test), 2 TB up, 1 TB down | SFTP endpoints: 1,460 hours x $0.3 = $438.00; Uploads: 2,048 GB x $0.04 = $81.92; Downloads: 1,024 GB x $0.04 = $40.96 | Total ~$560.88/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
4 endpoints 24/7 (SFTP/FTPS), 20 TB up, 10 TB down | Endpoints: 2,920 hours x $0.3 = $876.00; Uploads: 20,480 GB x $0.04 = $819.20; Downloads: 10,240 GB x $0.04 = $409.60 | Total ~$2,104.80/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
AWS Transfer Family pricing FAQ
Does stopping a server stop billing?
No. AWS bills the endpoint from creation until it is deleted, whether started or stopped.
Is each protocol billed separately?
Yes. SFTP, FTPS, FTP and AS2 on the same server are each billed per hour.
What is the minimum monthly cost?
About $219 for one protocol endpoint running all month in us-east-1 (730 h x $0.30), before data charges.
Are uploads free like S3?
No. Transfer Family charges $0.04 per GB uploaded and downloaded, in addition to S3 or EFS charges.
05 · Sources & estimate notes
Content pack dated 2026-10-19. Calculator rates remain their existing snapshots; this content update is not a price refresh.
Verification notes
- Wording that stopped servers keep billing should be confirmed on the current pricing page.
- Runway prices come from the calculator repository snapshot rate card transfer-family (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/aws-transfer-family/pricing/ before publishing.