AWS Pricing Calculator

How AWS instance pricing works

Amazon EC2 charges by the second for the compute you run, but the rate per hour swings widely with three levers: the instance type you pick, the region it runs in, and the purchase model you commit to. The estimator above pulls live on-demand, spot, and reserved rates from the DevZero instances dataset (the same figures behind our cloud instance price comparison), so the cloud server pricing comparison you see reflects real published prices rather than list-price guesses.

On-demand, spot, and reserved

• On-demand is the pay-as-you-go rate with no commitment: the safe default for spiky or short-lived workloads.
• Spot sells spare capacity at a steep discount (often 60–90% off on-demand) in exchange for the provider reclaiming it on short notice. Great for fault-tolerant and batch work. See which regions have the most reliable spare capacity on our spot instance availability map.
• Reserved (1- or 3-year) trades a usage commitment for a lower hourly rate, best for steady baseline load you know you will run around the clock.

Why the calculator picks an instance for you

Unlike the AWS Pricing Calculator in the console, which makes you already know the exact SKU, this tool takes the workload you actually have (vCPUs, memory, instance count) and finds the cheapest AWS instance type that meets those minimums, then bills it out to a monthly figure. Change the pricing model or bump the specs and every number updates instantly. Comparing clouds? The same workload is priced across AWS, Azure, and GCP side by side, and you can drill into any pair on the instance comparison explorer or switch to the Azure pricing calculator.

Turning an estimate into a lower bill

The rate is only half the equation; the other half is how much of what you pay for you actually use. Idle CPU, over-provisioned memory, and oversized nodes are where most cloud spend leaks. DevZero's Kubernetes cost optimization continuously right-sizes and bin-packs workloads so you run on the cheaper footprint this calculator points you toward. See where that lands on plan pricing on the DevZero pricing page.