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Pricing guide, Cloud Infrastructure
The four units that move most AWS bills, how a Savings Plan changes the compute rate, and why the support plan floor catches small accounts.
The short answer
AWS has no list plan, and you pay per unit. In US East, m5.large on demand is USD 0.0960 an hour, S3 Standard is USD 0.023 per GB a month, RDS for MySQL db.m5.large is USD 0.171 an hour and egress is USD 0.09 per GB after 100 GB free. Twenty m5.large instances running all year cost USD 16,819.
Written by Procurement VMS Editorial Team · Reviewed by Michael, Procurement Advisor Expert · Price data dated · 10 minute read
AWS does not have a price. It has tens of thousands of them, and your invoice is whatever your engineers metered last month. The unit rates are public and stable, but nobody owns the quantity, which is why AWS is hard to budget.
This guide prices the four units that move a bill for most companies: compute, object storage, a managed database and egress. It then covers the two things that decide the total, which commitment you signed and which support plan you carry.
Prices below were recorded on 17 October 2026. The headline figure is the lowest price you can get for that plan. Check the official page before you buy, because vendors change prices without notice.
USD0.0410 per hour (3 year EC2 Instance Savings Plan)
per unit, varies by service, billed yearly
Billed monthly: USD0.0960 per hour
Best for: Steady-state application and web servers
USD0.023 per GB-month
per unit, varies by service
Best for: Active data you read often
Reserved Instances quoted by term
per unit, varies by service, billed yearly
Billed monthly: USD0.171 per hour
Best for: Managed production databases
USD0.09 per GB
per unit, varies by service
Best for: Anything your users download
How billing works
There is no plan to pick and no list price for AWS as a whole. Your invoice is the sum of every metered unit you touched, so totals depend on usage. Compute bills per second with a 60-second minimum, storage bills on average GB held across the month, requests bill per thousand, and egress bills per GB after the first 100 GB a month. Savings Plans are a separate commitment in dollars per hour for 1 or 3 years, and they apply automatically to matching usage and not to a named account. Support is charged on top of all of it. The AWS Support pricing page lists Business Support+ at the greater of USD 29 a month or 9% of the first USD 10,000 of monthly charges, Enterprise Support at the greater of USD 5,000 a month or 10% of the first USD 150,000, and Unified Operations at the greater of USD 50,000 a month or 10% of the first USD 1 million.
The tier trap
AWS Support is the upgrade that catches finance teams. Enterprise Support carries a USD 5,000 a month floor, so a team spending USD 1,400 a month on compute can pay more for support than for AWS itself.
Read this first. Medium confidence. AWS renders its EC2, S3 and RDS rate tables in JavaScript, so those tables could not be read on the official pages. The EC2, S3, RDS, Savings Plan and spot rates come from 2026-dated third-party sources, while AWS Support, Savings Plan percentages and the egress free allowance were read on official AWS pages on 17 October 2026. The support page now lists Business Support+, Enterprise Support and Unified Operations, and an older Developer tier may still exist. The 60-second minimum and Savings Plan flexibility claims should be re-checked on the Savings Plans page. All rates are US East, Linux, USD.
Move the slider to see what each plan costs at your size. The figures use the list prices on this page and leave out tax, add-ons and any discount you negotiate.
Twenty instances running all year show what a commitment saves and what a support floor adds.
| Scenario | Cost per year | Against the headline |
|---|---|---|
| 20 m5.large instances on demand, running 24/7 for a year | USD16,819 | Headline price |
| Same 20 instances on a 3 year EC2 Instance Savings Plan at USD 0.0410 an hour | USD7,183 | -USD 9,636 |
| 20 m5.large on demand plus Enterprise Support at its USD 5,000 a month minimum | USD76,819 | +USD 60,000 |
Compare the plans side by side. Where a cell says Check page, the vendor's pricing page was not specific enough for us to fill it in.
| Purchase option | On demand | Compute Savings Plan | EC2 Instance Savings Plan | Spot |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maximum saving versus on demand | 0% | Up to 66% | Up to 72% | Varies by capacity |
| Commitment | None | 1 or 3 years | 1 or 3 years | None |
| m5.large hourly, US East, 1 year | USD 0.0960 | USD 0.0710 | USD 0.0600 | USD 0.0408 |
| m5.large hourly, US East, 3 year | USD 0.0960 | USD 0.0490 | USD 0.0410 | Not applicable |
| Annual cost, 20 instances at the 3 year rate | USD 16,819 | USD 8,585 | USD 7,183 | USD 7,148 |
Features we could not place by plan: Can be interrupted by AWS. Check the official page for which plan includes each one.
Pick it if the workload is new, spiky or likely to be rearchitected within a year.
Pick it if your total compute spend is stable but the instance families and regions will keep moving.
Pick it if you will keep running a specific instance family in a specific region for 1 to 3 years.
Pick it if the work is batch, stateless and can be restarted when AWS reclaims capacity.
Our view
AWS is worth the price when you use the breadth: managed databases, global regions and the deepest service catalog in the market. For a team running a dozen steady servers and a bucket, the same workload on a simpler provider costs a fraction, and the real AWS premium is the support plan and the egress bill and not the instance rate.
You may be overpaying if
You pay on-demand rates for instances that have run untouched for a year, you carry Enterprise Support at its USD 5,000 monthly floor on a small account, or you serve large files to the internet without a CDN in front of them.
An EC2 Instance Savings Plan takes m5.large from USD 0.0960 to USD 0.0410 an hour on a 3-year term, which is USD 9,636 a year on 20 instances.
Business Support+ starts at USD 29 a month against Enterprise Support's USD 5,000 floor. Match the plan to the account's real spend and risk, not to the biggest one on offer.
Internet egress is USD 0.09 per GB after the free 100 GB. Caching cuts the metered GB and does not need a rate negotiation.
S3 Standard at USD 0.023 per GB against Glacier Deep Archive at USD 0.00099 is a 23x gap. Respect the minimum durations and the saving is real.
m5.large spot was reported at USD 0.0408 an hour against USD 0.0960 on demand in US East. Use it only where interruption is survivable.
Google Cloud c4-standard-2 at USD 0.096866 an hour and Azure D4s v5 at USD 0.1920 an hour are real reference points to take into a negotiation.
Renewal email you can copy
Fill in the brackets and send it about 90 days before the renewal date. It works best next to your renewal tracker.
Subject: Amazon Web Services renewal on [renewal date] Hi [account manager], Our Amazon Web Services [plan] subscription renews on [renewal date]. Over the last 90 days, [active m5.large instances running 24/7] of the [paid m5.large instances running 24/7] we pay for used it. We would like to renew with [target m5.large instances running 24/7] on a [term] term. Before we sign, please send: 1. The current list price and the price you are offering us, line by line. 2. The cap on any price increase at the next renewal. 3. The notice period if we want to cut m5.large instances running 24/7 or move to another plan. We are comparing this against [alternative] and plan to decide by [decision date]. If you can offer [target discount] percent off list, or a lower price for a longer term, we are ready to talk this week. Thank you, [name] [company]
Free PDF and Excel
A one page summary of every plan, plus an Excel model that adds up your own seat count.
If this vendor does not fit, these are the closest options and what they charge.
| Alternative | Starting price | Pick it when |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Azure | USD0.1920 per hour (D4s v5, East US, pay as you go) | Your estate is already Microsoft and you can use existing licences Read our Microsoft Azure pricing guide |
| Google Cloud | USD0.096866 per hour (c4-standard-2, us-central1, on demand) | You want committed use discounts without locking to one instance family |
| DigitalOcean | USD4 per month (cheapest Basic Droplet, 1 vCPU, 512 MiB) | You run a handful of simple servers and want a predictable flat bill Read our DigitalOcean pricing guide |
Cloud usage grows without a purchase order. Review the commitment date and the support plan on a schedule, with an owner outside the engineering team.
Bottom line. Commit only on steady workloads, size the support plan to real spend, and cache before you pay for egress. Put the commitment date and support renewal on a calendar with an owner.
It depends on the unit. In US East, an m5.large Linux instance is USD 0.0960 an hour on demand, dropping to USD 0.0410 an hour on a 3-year EC2 Instance Savings Plan. RDS for MySQL db.m5.large Single-AZ is USD 0.171 an hour.
Yes. The AWS Free Tier includes service-specific allowances plus 100 GB of internet data transfer out each month, aggregated across services and regions. The free egress allowance applies to every account, not just new ones.
Enterprise Support is the greater of USD 5,000 a month or 10% of your first USD 150,000 of monthly AWS charges, falling to 7%, 5% and 3% in higher bands. Business Support+ starts at USD 29 a month, and Unified Operations starts at USD 50,000 a month.
Yes. Compute Savings Plans cut up to 66% and EC2 Instance Savings Plans up to 72% against on demand, on 1 or 3 year terms. Spot capacity is cheaper again, and larger accounts negotiate private pricing agreements directly.
Yes, where usage is steady. On 20 m5.large instances, moving from USD 0.0960 to USD 0.0410 an hour on a 3-year EC2 Instance Savings Plan takes the annual bill from USD 16,819 to USD 7,183, a saving of USD 9,636.
For simple servers, DigitalOcean is the cheapest mainstream option, with the smallest Basic Droplet at USD 4 a month. Google Cloud c4-standard-2 at USD 0.096866 an hour and Azure D4s v5 at USD 0.1920 an hour are the closest full-platform comparisons.
We start from the vendor pricing page and note the date. Where a figure comes from a third party instead, we say so on the page. Procurement VMS is a ratings and comparison site, not a software vendor, and nobody paid for a place in this guide. Spot a number that has changed? Tell us on the contact page and we will check it.
You get a one page PDF and an Excel model with your seat count, the plans above and a renewal checklist.
Choosing software instead of renewing? See the ranked procurement software list.
