AWS EC2 Pricing Calculator

EC2 pricing combines four variables: instance type, region, operating system, and pricing model. The base On-Demand rate is set per instance family per region. Multiply that hourly rate by 730 hours for a 24/7 month, then by the number of instances. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans apply a discount factor of 28 to 52% on the On-Demand rate depending on term length and commitment type. Add EBS storage and outbound data transfer for the full bill.

Reserved Instances commit to a specific instance family in a specific region for 1 or 3 years and lock in a discount of 36 to 52%. Compute Savings Plans commit to an hourly compute spend for 1 or 3 years (any region, family, OS, or tenancy) at 28 to 50% off. Reserved Instances offer slightly deeper discounts on a fixed config; Savings Plans trade some discount for flexibility. Both bill at the discounted rate automatically when matching usage occurs.

Typical savings vs On-Demand: 1-Year No Upfront Reserved Instance saves about 36%. 3-Year No Upfront saves about 52%. 1-Year All Upfront saves about 38%. 3-Year All Upfront saves up to 63% but requires the full payment at start. For an m5.large running 24/7 in us-east-1, that is $25 to $44 per instance per month in savings. The break-even on a 1-year RI is roughly 8 to 9 months of usage.

Inbound data transfer to EC2 is free. Outbound to the internet has a 100 GB per month free tier across all AWS services, then about $0.09 per GB up to 10 TB per month, dropping to $0.085, $0.07, and $0.05 per GB at higher volume tiers. Asia Pacific regions like Singapore and Tokyo charge roughly 33% more for outbound transfer. Inter-region transfer is billed at the source region rate.

Windows includes a Microsoft license fee that AWS pays Microsoft and passes through. The premium is roughly $0.046 per vCPU per hour for general and compute instances and lower for burstable T-family. For an m5.large with 2 vCPUs, that adds $0.096 per hour over Linux, doubling the price. SQL Server licenses add even more on top. Linux (especially Amazon Linux 2023) is the cheapest path on EC2.

Graviton is AWS-built ARM-based silicon. It runs Linux workloads at roughly 20% lower cost per hour and often delivers better price-performance for web servers, microservices, containers, and most general workloads. Graviton requires ARM-compatible builds; most modern languages (Go, Node, Python, Java) handle this automatically. Graviton does not run Windows. If you can recompile or use ARM container images, Graviton is the cheapest path on EC2.

This calculator uses an approximate price snapshot covering common configurations and is meant for fast ballpark estimates. It is typically within 5% of the official numbers for the instance types and regions included. For final budget commits, especially for Spot Instances, Dedicated Hosts, GPU instances, or specialized regions, use the official AWS Pricing Calculator at calculator.aws which pulls live pricing from the AWS API.

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