Pricing Flashcards
Free Tier
The AWS Free Tier enables you to begin using certain services without having to worry about incurring costs for the specified period.
Three types of offers are available:
- Always Free
- 12 Months Free
- Trials
For each free tier offer, make sure to review the specific details about exactly which resource types are included.
Always Free
These offers do not expire and are available to all AWS customers.
For example, AWS Lambda allows 1 million free requests and up to 3.2 million seconds of compute time per month. Amazon DynamoDB allows 25 GB of free storage per month.
12 months free
These offers are free for 12 months following your initial sign-up date to AWS.
Examples include specific amounts of Amazon S3 Standard Storage, thresholds for monthly hours of Amazon EC2 compute time, and amounts of Amazon CloudFront data transfer out.
Trials
Short-term free trial offers start from the date you activate a particular service. The length of each trial might vary by number of days or the amount of usage in the service.
For example, Amazon Inspector offers a 90-day free trial. Amazon Lightsail (a service that enables you to run virtual private servers) offers 750 free hours of usage over a 30-day period.
Pay for what you use
For each service, you pay for exactly the amount of resources that you actually use, without requiring long-term contracts or complex licensing.
Pay less when you reserve
Some services offer reservation options that provide a significant discount compared to On-Demand Instance pricing.
For example, suppose that your company is using Amazon EC2 instances for a workload that needs to run continuously. You might choose to run this workload on Amazon EC2 Instance Savings Plans, because the plan allows you to save up to 72% over the equivalent On-Demand Instance capacity.
Pay less with volume-based discounts when you use more
Some services offer tiered pricing, so the per-unit cost is incrementally lower with increased usage.
For example, the more Amazon S3 storage space you use, the less you pay for it per GB.
AWS Pricing Calculator
The AWS Pricing Calculator lets you explore AWS services and create an estimate for the cost of your use cases on AWS. You can organize your AWS estimates by groups that you define. A group can reflect how your company is organized, such as providing estimates by cost center.
AWS Billing & Cost Management Dashboard
Use the AWS Billing & Cost Management dashboard to pay your AWS bill, monitor your usage, and analyze and control your costs.
- Compare your current month-to-date balance with the previous month, and get a forecast of the next month based on current usage.
- View month-to-date spend by service.
- View Free Tier usage by service.
- Access Cost Explorer and create budgets.
- Purchase and manage Savings Plans.
- Publish AWS Cost and Usage Reports.
Consolidated Billing
The consolidated billing feature of AWS Organizations enables you to receive a single bill for all AWS accounts in your organization. By consolidating, you can easily track the combined costs of all the linked accounts in your organization. The default maximum number of accounts allowed for an organization is 4, but you can contact AWS Support to increase your quota, if needed.
On your monthly bill, you can review itemized charges incurred by each account. This enables you to have greater transparency into your organization’s accounts while still maintaining the convenience of receiving a single monthly bill.
Another benefit of consolidated billing is the ability to share bulk discount pricing, Savings Plans, and Reserved Instances across the accounts in your organization. For instance, one account might not have enough monthly usage to qualify for discount pricing. However, when multiple accounts are combined, their aggregated usage may result in a benefit that applies across all accounts in the organization.
AWS Budgets
In AWS Budgets, you can create budgets to plan your service usage, service costs, and instance reservations.
The information in AWS Budgets updates three times a day. This helps you to accurately determine how close your usage is to your budgeted amounts or to the AWS Free Tier limits.
In AWS Budgets, you can also set custom alerts when your usage exceeds (or is forecasted to exceed) the budgeted amount.
AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer is a tool that enables you to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time.
AWS Cost Explorer includes a default report of the costs and usage for your top five cost-accruing AWS services. You can apply custom filters and groups to analyze your data. For example, you can view resource usage at the hourly level.
AWS Support
AWS offers four different Support plans to help you troubleshoot issues, lower costs, and efficiently use AWS services.
You can choose from the following Support plans to meet your company’s needs:
- Basic
- Developer
- Business
- Enterprise On-Ramp
- Enterprise
Basic Support
Basic Support is free for all AWS customers. It includes access to whitepapers, documentation, and support communities. With Basic Support, you can also contact AWS for billing questions and service limit increases.
With Basic Support, you have access to a limited selection of AWS Trusted Advisor checks. Additionally, you can use the AWS Personal Health Dashboard, a tool that provides alerts and remediation guidance when AWS is experiencing events that may affect you.
Developer Support
Customers in the Developer Support plan have access to features such as:
- Best practice guidance
- Client-side diagnostic tools
- Building-block architecture support, which consists of guidance for how to use AWS offerings, features, and services together