Billing, Pricing, and Support
How AWS prices
Four ideas drive every pricing question: pay-as-you-go, save when you reserve, pay less by using more (volume tiers, consolidated billing), and pay less as AWS grows. Compute is billed per second with a one-minute minimum for Linux instances; storage is billed per GB-month; data transfer in is free, data transfer out is charged, and traffic between Availability Zones or Regions is charged while same-AZ private traffic generally is not.
Purchase options
- On-Demand - no commitment, highest unit price, best for unpredictable or short-lived workloads.
- Savings Plans / Reserved Instances - commit for one or three years for a large discount on steady-state usage.
- Spot - up to a steep discount but can be interrupted; only for fault-tolerant, stateless work such as batch jobs.
- Dedicated Hosts - physical server for licensing or compliance needs.
Tools
Pricing Calculator estimates cost before you build; Cost Explorer analyzes actual spend after; Budgets sends alerts when you exceed a threshold; Cost and Usage Report is the most granular billing data; the TCO Calculator compares on-premises costs with AWS. AWS Organizations consolidated billing pools usage so volume discounts apply across accounts.
Support plans
Basic (free: billing and account help, limited Trusted Advisor checks), Developer (business-hours email, technical guidance), Business (24/7 phone and chat, full Trusted Advisor, one-hour response for production-down), Enterprise On-Ramp, and Enterprise (15-minute response for business-critical outages, designated Technical Account Manager).
Traps
Basic support does not include technical support cases. Reserved capacity is a poor fit for sporadic workloads. Spot instances must never back an unshakable database. Inbound data transfer is not billed, so "cost to upload to S3" answers are usually wrong.
Worked example
A company runs a steady 24/7 web tier plus a nightly image-processing batch. Steady tier: Savings Plan or Reserved Instances. Batch tier: Spot, because it tolerates interruption and runs briefly.
Rule of thumb: steady and predictable → reserve; spiky but required → On-Demand; interruptible → Spot.