AWS Pricing — Pay for What You Use

AWS pricing is based on three fundamental drivers: compute, storage, and data transfer out.

AWS pricing principles:

Pay as you go — no long-term contracts required

Pay less when you reserve — commit for 1-3 years for big discounts

Pay less with volume — more usage = lower per-unit cost

No charge for data transfer INTO AWS; charge for data OUT

AWS Free Tier:

Always Free (e.g., 1M Lambda requests/month)

12 months free (e.g., 750 hours EC2 t2.micro/month)

Trials (e.g., 90-day free trial of specific services)

Cost management tools:

AWS Pricing Calculator — estimate costs before deploying

AWS Cost Explorer — visualize and analyze actual costs; identify trends

AWS Budgets — set alerts when costs or usage exceed thresholds

AWS Cost & Usage Report (CUR) — most detailed billing report; used for enterprise cost allocation

Consolidated billing: AWS Organizations allows multiple accounts to be billed together. Combined usage gets volume discounts. One bill for all accounts.

Reference:

Wikipedia: AWS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services