AWS Cost Estimator

This tool uses simplified on-demand pricing for US East (N. Virginia) region as of 2024. Actual costs depend on your specific region, reserved instance discounts, Savings Plans, data transfer between AZs, and usage patterns. Use this for ballpark estimates — always verify with the official AWS Pricing Calculator for production budgets.

On-demand instances are billed by the hour with no commitment — flexible but most expensive. Reserved Instances (1 or 3-year commitment) offer 30-60% savings. Savings Plans offer similar discounts with more flexibility. For stable workloads running 24/7, reserved instances pay for themselves quickly.

t3 instances are burstable — great for dev environments and variable-load apps with occasional CPU spikes. m5 instances are general-purpose with balanced CPU/memory — best for most production workloads. c5 instances are compute-optimized — ideal for CPU-intensive tasks like encoding, ML inference, or batch processing.

Multi-AZ RDS maintains a synchronous standby replica in a different availability zone. AWS charges for both the primary and standby instances. This provides automatic failover in under 60 seconds if the primary fails, which is worth the cost for production databases.

EC2 egress bandwidth costs $0.09/GB vs CloudFront at $0.0085/GB for the first 10TB. For high-traffic sites, CloudFront can reduce bandwidth costs by 90%+ while also improving latency by caching content at edge locations worldwide.

LCU (Load Balancer Capacity Units) measure ALB resource consumption across 4 dimensions: new connections/sec, active connections, processed bytes, and rule evaluations. AWS charges for the highest-consumed dimension. For most web apps, 5-10 LCUs is typical at moderate traffic.