TOP 10 World’s Cheapest AWS Services

Cost reduction is often the main driver for cloud adoption. Moving to the cloud is usually cheaper than maintaining your old physical infrastructure, but sometimes the resulting cost savings may not be that obvious.

Imagine that one day it turns out that the one-to-one lift-and-shift you just did won’t save you as much money as you initially expected. As a result, your company will end up paying almost the same as before. True, you will enjoy all the benefits of the cloud, but it will come at a price. Can you already see your CFO shaking their head in disappointment?!

What can you do? The straight answer is: start using cloud-native services wherever possible. On top of many other advantages, they are cheap. Much cheaper than you think!

Our Top 10 Picks for Cheap AWS Services

There are plenty AWS services to choose from, so to save you a headache, we selected ten that are affordable while offering the best value for money.

Some services don’t cost a dime, like VPC for instance, but we focused on the cheapest, and not the ones that come absolutely for free.

Note that all the prices in the below article apply for the North Virginia region. For some services prices may be different in various regions, so be careful and always check the rates before deployment.

The most current pricing can always be found here: https://aws.amazon.com/pricing/services/.

1. Amazon Lambda

The first service on the list, Amazon Lambda, is an event-driven, serverless compute service. It runs your code and manages the underlying, high-availability compute resources. It can run code in response to events such as HTTP requests, object modification in S3 bucket, DB table, etc.

When using Lambda, you get charged for the total number of requests, the execution time and the amount of memory allocated per function. A request is counted every time it starts executing a function. Duration is calculated from the time your code starts executing until it finishes or terminates. Time is rounded to the nearest 100ms.

You pay:

• $0.20 per 1 million requests, which is $0.0000002 per request
• $0.00001667 per every GB-second used

Pricing example:

You allocated 512MB of memory to your function, which runs 1 million times per month. Each run takes 1 second.

• Monthly compute price is $0.00001667 per GB-s
• Total compute (seconds) = 1,000,000 * 1s = 1,000,000 seconds
• Total compute (GB-s) = 1,000,000s * 512MB/1,024MB = 500,000 Gb-s
• Monthly compute charge = 500,000 * $0.00001667 = $8.335
• Monthly request charge = $0.20/1,000,000 * 1,000,000 = $0.20
• Total monthly charges = $8.535

2. Amazon Glacier

The second service is Amazon Glacier, used to store files in archives. An archive can be a photo, video or a document. A single archive can be 40 terabytes large. Glacier can store an unlimited number of archives or any amount of data.

You will pay only for what you use, and there is no minimum fee for using Glacier.

You pay:

• $0.004 per GB per month
• $0.05 per 1,000 UPLOAD requests, which is $0.00005 per request

This means you will be charged $4 per month for every terabyte of data stored in Glacier. It’s quite low-cost, and Glacier is one of the cheapest Amazon services, however…

There always comes a time when you need your data back. And Glacier charges you for restoring it. The price for data retrieval depends on a chosen retrieval plan and varies from $0.03 per GB for expedited retrieval to $0.0025 per GB for bulk retrieval. You also have to pay for retrieval requests.

3. Amazon Lex

With Amazon Lex, you can build a conversational bot, which can be a voice and text interface for your application. It provides the advanced deep learning functionalities of automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding.

When using Lex, you pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee or upfront commitments.

You pay:

• $0.004 per voice request
• $0.00075 per text request

The usage is measured in “requests processed” and is calculated at the end of the month.

Pricing example:

Your bot processes 1,000 voice requests and 2,000 text requests per month. This means you pay:

• Voice requests: 1,000 * $0.004 = $4
• Text requests: 2,000 * $0.00075 = $1.5
• Total monthly charge for your bot is $5.5.

4. Amazon Polly

Number four, Amazon Polly, is a service that turns text into speech. It includes dozens of voices and support for a variety of languages. To use it, you just have to send a text to the Amazon Polly API, and it immediately returns the audio stream to your application. As in the case of many other services, you pay as you go for Amazon Polly with no upfront commitment. You get charged based on the number of characters of a text that you convert either to

As in the case of many other services, you pay as you go for Amazon Polly with no upfront commitment. You get charged based on the number of characters of a text that you convert either to speech, or to Speech Marks metadata.

You pay:

• $4.00 per 1 million characters for speech requests
• $4.00 per 1 million characters for Speech Marks requests

For instance, if you want to convert to speech “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain, which is ~600k characters or 224 pages, you will pay less than $2.50. Seems to be cheaper than buying an audio book!

5. Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront, our number five, is a global content delivery network service. It is used to securely deliver data, videos, applications, and APIs to your viewers. CloudFront allows you to serve data from the places that are closer to your customers. You can send data to CloudFront from your S3 buckets for instance, but you can also send data from your on-premises resources. However, the second case incurs some extra fee.

When using CloudFront, you mainly pay for data transfer out to the Internet.

You pay:

• $0.020 — $0.085 per GB per month

Let’s assume your web page size is 500KB and you have 1,000 visitors per day and 2 page views per average visitor. In such a case, you will pay:

• 500 KB * 2 * 1000 = ~1 GB per day
• 1 GB * 30 days = 30 GB per month
• 30 GB * $0.085 = $2.55 per month

6. Amazon Lightsail

Lightsail is a cheap Virtual Private Server (VPS). It is an all-in-one solution, which has everything you need to jumpstart a project on AWS; it includes compute, storage and networking. And it is cheap. Really cheap.

There are a few plans to choose from. They differ in memory, compute power, storage, and outbound data transfer.

You pay:

From $5 per month for 1 Core CPU, 512MB memory, 20GB SSD and 1TB transfer up to $80 per month for 2 Core CPU, 8GB memory, 80GB SSD and 5TB transfer.

7. Amazon SQS

At number seven comes Amazon Simple Queuing Service (SQS), a web service that gives you access to message queues. Messages are sent between different components of your environment and are stored in queues to wait for their turn to be processed. You don’t need every component to be always available, and no message will be lost. SQS also provides server-side encryption to protect sensitive data. As usual, you pay as you go, which means there’s no minimum fee and no upfront commitment.

You pay:

• $0.40 per million requests for standard queue ($0.00000040 per request)
• $0.50 per million requests for FIFO queue ($0.00000050 per request)
• $0.05 — $0.09 per GB of data transferred out of Amazon SQS

8. Amazon SNS

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a messaging and mobile notification service that allows you to coordinate delivery of messages and notifications to subscribers. Your application or service can publish a message to the SNS, and that message will become available to subscribers.

As an example, you can use SNS to inform services or applications or to get notified yourself that some thresholds have been reached. With SNS you can also send SMS messages to over 200 countries. Of course, there is no upfront cost, and you pay as you go.

You pay:

• $0.50 per million publishes
• $0.50 per million mobile push notifications
• $2.00 per 100k email notifications
• $0.60 per million HTTP/s notifications

9. AWS Internet of Things (IoT)

AWS IoT, our number nine, is a service that allows you to connect different devices to the cloud and interact with cloud applications. It can support billions of devices and trillions of messages. You can leverage IoT to build applications that gather, process, analyze and act on data sent by connected devices. For example, it gives you the possibility to collect data from engines, analyze them, and predict when any of them will require service. Needless to mention that there is no upfront payment, nor a minimum fee for the IoT service. Pay as you go. Pay as usual.

You pay:

• $5.00 per million 512-bytes long messages

Pricing example:

You have 100 sensors sending data to AWS IoT. Every minute, each sensor sends a message that’s 400 bytes long. Received data is then stored in S3 bucket and DynamoDB.

• Cost to publish to IoT: 100 sensors * 1 message * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 30 days = 4,320,000 messages per month
• 4,320,000 * $5.00/1,000,000 = $21.6 per month
• Delivery to S3 and DynamoDB is free of charge

10. Amazon Athena

Last but not least, Amazon Athena is a query service that allows you to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using SQL and get results in seconds. For instance, you can use Athena to analyze data gathered from your 100 sensors connected to AWS IoT.

Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure for you to manage. It scales automatically and can execute queries in parallel, so it is fast even in the case of large datasets.

And the pricing plan? Guess what! Yes! It comes in the pay-as-you-go model, which means that you pay only for the queries you run. You can reduce costs by compressing, partitioning or converting your data to the columnar format.

You pay:

• $5.00 per TB of data scanned

To analyze the data gathered from 100 sensors in the previous example, you would pay $0.00864, which is:

• 4,320,000 requests * 400 bytes = 1,728,000,000 bytes = 1,728 GB = 0.001728TB
• 0.001728 TB * $5.00 = $0.00864

These 10 cheap AWS services should make your CFO happy!

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