How much does AWS cost? A guide to real costs
It is one of the questions we get most often: “what is AWS going to cost us?” The honest answer is that it depends. But there are concrete variables that decide your bill, and understanding them before you start saves you expensive surprises.
The four services that drive most of the bill
Across most of the companies we work with, 80% of the AWS bill comes from four categories:
- EC2 (compute): Virtual server instances. A t3.medium runs around $30 USD/month on-demand. Ten similar unoptimized instances is $300/month in compute alone — before storage, databases or transfer.
- RDS (managed databases): Databases on RDS cost roughly 2 to 3 times an equivalent EC2 instance, because of the managed-service overhead. A db.t3.medium Multi-AZ for high availability sits around $120 to $150 USD/month.
- Data transfer: Data leaving AWS for the internet costs approximately $0.09 USD per GB in us-east-1. If your application serves a lot of media or your users download frequently, this becomes a significant line item fast.
- S3 (object storage): Relatively cheap per gigabyte ($0.023/GB/month in Standard), but requests (GET, PUT) and transfer out of S3 cost extra. Companies with many images or static files are often surprised by the request charges rather than the storage.
If you are billed in USD from outside the US
AWS bills in US dollars. If your company is based in Latin America and buys directly, two things follow that are easy to miss when budgeting.
First, your real cost in local currency moves month to month even if your usage is identical: if the exchange rate rises 5%, your bill rises 5% without you starting a single extra server. Budget the usage in dollars and the exchange rate separately, or you will never know which one moved.
Second, local sales tax is applied on top, and whether you can reclaim it depends on your tax status. Where the tax is recoverable, your effective cost is the dollar amount. Where it is not, that percentage is pure cost and belongs in the budget from day one. Check with your accountant which case applies — the difference is material at any meaningful spend.
Typical monthly ranges by company size
Based on what we see with real clients:
Startup or small project: $50 – $300 USD/month
One or two small EC2 instances, a basic RDS database, some S3 and moderate traffic. The simplest architecture that works. At this size aggressive optimization rarely pays for itself — the absolute savings are small.
Growing SMB: $500 – $2,000 USD/month
Several EC2 instances, Multi-AZ RDS for production, staging environments, S3 with some CloudFront, and possibly managed services like ElastiCache or SQS. A cost review starts to pay off here: the typical 20 to 30% of waste means $100 to $600 USD a month you can recover.
Mid-size company: $2,000 – $10,000 USD/month
Multiple environments, containerized workloads on ECS or EKS, several databases, integrations with other AWS services, possibly multiple accounts. A serious FinOps review here can free up $500 to $3,000 USD monthly.
Large company: $10,000+ USD/month
Complex architectures, multiple regions, AWS Organizations with several accounts. An ongoing FinOps practice becomes essential — unmanaged waste at this scale runs into tens of thousands of dollars a month.
The most common mistake: on-demand for everything
AWS has three main pricing models for EC2 and RDS: on-demand, where you pay by the hour; Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, where you commit to 1 or 3 years in exchange for a 30 to 60% discount; and Spot, interruptible instances discounted up to 90% but only suitable for workloads that tolerate interruption.
Most companies that come to us have 80 to 100% of their workloads on-demand, because “that is how it was set up at the beginning”. If those workloads have been running steadily for more than a year, moving to Savings Plans can cut that line by 30 to 40% without changing anything else. For a company spending $1,500 USD a month on on-demand EC2, that is $450 to $600 in monthly savings for a purchasing decision, not an engineering project.
Not sure where your bill is going?
Our AWS Health Check reviews your account and shows where the waste is, with the savings prioritized by effort. It is free and takes about a week.
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