AWS Cost Calculator

A t3.medium EC2 instance runs about $30.37 a month in US East (N. Virginia), S3 Standard storage costs $0.023 per GB, and a db.t3.medium RDS MySQL instance runs close to $50 a month before storage. Our AWS cost calculator below adds up compute, storage, database, networking and four other service lines into one monthly estimate, with no AWS account and no email required to see the number.

Quick facts

• Covers 8 AWS service categories: compute, storage, database, networking and CDN, security and identity, DevOps and CI/CD, messaging, and monitoring.
• Built on current published AWS on-demand rates for US East (N. Virginia); switch regions for a rough adjustment.
• Shows a second “optimized” number next to your estimate, based on common rightsizing and commitment savings.
• Meant for fast budget conversations, not a replacement for the official AWS Pricing Calculator when you need an exact quote.

Try the calculator

Pick the services you use, enter rough usage, and the tool below totals them instantly. Nothing is saved unless you choose to email yourself the result.

Why your number won’t match your actual bill

Every AWS calculator, ours included, is an estimate built on list prices. Your real invoice almost never matches list price, and the gap usually runs in one direction: down, assuming you’ve done any cost work at all.

Three things move the number most:

The first 12 months of a new AWS account include a free tier: 750 hours of a t2.micro or t3.micro, 5 GB of S3 storage, and a slice of RDS and Lambda usage, all at no charge. A calculator can’t know your account’s age, so it always assumes you’re past the free tier.

Reserved Instances and Savings Plans cut compute prices by 30 to 72 percent in exchange for a one or three year commitment. If your workload runs 24/7, pricing it at the on-demand rate (what every calculator shows by default) overstates your real cost once you’ve bought a commitment.

Data transfer is the quiet one. AWS gives you the first 100 GB of outbound data free each month, then charges $0.09 per GB after that. A video-heavy app moving a few terabytes out to users can rack up more in egress than in compute, and it’s the line item most calculators understate because nobody enters a realistic egress number on the first try.

What a small production setup actually costs

Numbers help more than adjectives here. Take a fairly ordinary setup: a web app on one t3.medium EC2 instance, 500 GB in S3, a db.t3.medium RDS MySQL database, and 5 million Lambda invocations a month averaging 200ms each at 512 MB memory.

Compute runs about $30 a month for the EC2 instance. Storage adds roughly $11.50 for the S3 data (500 GB at $0.023). The database is close to $50 for the instance itself, before you add storage and backups. Lambda, at that volume, lands under $2: 5 million requests at $0.20 per million is $1, and the compute time at $0.0000166667 per GB-second adds well under a dollar more.

Add it up and you land somewhere around $95 to $110 a month, before data transfer, a load balancer, or a NAT gateway (NAT gateways are their own trap; they bill per hour and per GB processed, and teams forget both). That’s a useful sanity check: if your own estimate for a similar setup comes back at $400, something is probably oversized, or you’re counting a service twice.

Where the official calculator gets slow

AWS’s own Pricing Calculator became more capable in 2025, adding a view for discounts and existing commitments and letting teams import historical usage instead of modeling it by hand, according to AWS’s own announcement. It’s the right tool when you need a number precise enough to put in a vendor quote or a board deck.

It’s also slow for the question most people actually have, which is closer to “roughly what would this cost.” The official calculator wants every service added and configured one at a time, assumes a fixed 730 hour month even though AWS bills per second, and leaves out tax, support plan fees, and anything outside its own catalog of modeled services, a gap the FinOps tooling vendor nOps has documented in detail. For a two minute budget conversation with an engineering lead, that’s a lot of friction for a ballpark figure.

That’s the gap this page fills. Use it for the quick version of the question. Use the official calculator, or your own AWS Cost Explorer data, when the number needs to survive a procurement review.

FAQ

Is the AWS cost calculator on this page accurate?
It’s accurate to published on-demand list pricing for the services and region you select, which makes it a solid planning estimate. It won’t match your actual invoice exactly, because it can’t see your free tier status, existing commitments, or support plan.

Does this calculator cover AWS Free Tier usage?
No. It prices everything at the standard on-demand rate so the estimate stays consistent across accounts of any age. Subtract your known free tier allowance manually if your account is under 12 months old.

Can I use this for a cost estimate in a client proposal?
For a rough range, yes. For a figure a client will hold you to, run the same workload through the official AWS Pricing Calculator first and treat this tool as your sanity check, not your final number.

Sources

• AWS: Pricing Calculator, now generally available, supports discounts and purchase commitments (AWS official announcement, May 2025)
• Holori AWS EC2 pricing calculator: t3.medium, us-east-1
• Upstash: AWS S3 Pricing Explained (2026)
• Bytebase dbcost: db.t3.medium RDS pricing
• Eon.io: AWS Lambda Pricing
• nOps: AWS Pricing Calculator vs Cost Explorer

Written by the FinOpsDaily editorial team. Last updated: November 2026. Pricing shown is for US East (N. Virginia) and changes periodically; always confirm current rates against AWS’s own pricing pages before budgeting.