Short answer: yes, forever
Do EBS snapshots cost money?
Yes, and the way they are billed means the total creeps rather than jumps, which is precisely why nobody notices.
EBS snapshots cost $0.05 per GB-month in the standard tier, billed on changed blocks rather than on the full volume size. Nothing deletes them by default. A daily snapshot of a 500 GB volume with 2% daily change costs roughly $25 for the first snapshot and about $0.50 for each one after it, so a year of daily snapshots with no lifecycle policy settles at around $115 a month and keeps climbing.
How incremental billing actually works
Only the first snapshot of a volume stores every block. Each one after it stores only the blocks that changed since the previous snapshot, and references the rest. That is why the second snapshot of a 500 GB volume can cost cents.
The counter-intuitive part is deletion. Deleting a snapshot does not free all of its blocks, because later snapshots may still reference them. AWS only reclaims blocks no remaining snapshot needs. So deleting the oldest snapshot in a chain often frees almost nothing, and people conclude that deleting snapshots does not help. It does; it just has to be the whole chain.
The other trap is orphans. Terminating an instance does not delete its snapshots. Neither does deleting the volume. Snapshots outlive everything they were taken from, which is how accounts end up paying for backups of servers deleted three years ago.
What a retention policy is worth
| Policy | Snapshots kept | Approximate monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| None, daily snapshots, one year in | 365 | ~$115 |
| 7 daily | 7 | ~$28 |
| 7 daily + 4 weekly | 11 | ~$30 |
| 7 daily + 4 weekly + 12 monthly | 23 | ~$36 |
A 500 GB volume with 2% daily change, $0.05 per GB-month. Real numbers depend heavily on change rate, but the shape is always this: the first snapshot is the expensive one and the tail is what runs away.
Where to look
- →Snapshots whose source volume no longer exists. The EC2 console shows the source volume ID against each snapshot. If that volume is gone, nothing is going to restore from that snapshot, and it is billing anyway.
- →AMIs nobody has launched. Every AMI is backed by snapshots, and deregistering the AMI does not delete them. Old AMIs from a CI pipeline that builds a fresh one nightly are one of the largest snapshot piles we find.
- →The archive tier. Snapshots you must keep for compliance but will realistically never restore belong in the archive tier, at about a quarter of the standard price. The catch is a 24 to 72 hour restore time and a 90-day minimum, so it is for archives rather than for backups.
- →Data Lifecycle Manager. AWS’s own scheduler creates and expires snapshots on a policy. It is free, and it is the difference between a backup strategy and a growing pile.
Put numbers on it
Frequently asked questions
Does deleting a snapshot free up the full volume size?
Rarely. AWS only reclaims blocks that no remaining snapshot references, so deleting one snapshot from the middle of a chain frees only the blocks unique to it. Deleting a whole chain frees everything. This is why deleting a few old snapshots often makes almost no difference to the bill.
Are snapshots cheaper than keeping the volume?
Yes, usually by half or more. A 100 GB gp2 volume costs $10 a month whether or not anything reads it. A snapshot of the same volume costs $5 at most and normally much less, because only used blocks are stored. For anything you might need in months rather than days, snapshot and terminate.
Do snapshots in another region cost extra?
Copying a snapshot to another region costs the data transfer once, then the copy is billed as a separate full snapshot in that region at the same $0.05 per GB-month. Cross-region copies for disaster recovery frequently double a snapshot bill without anyone connecting the two.
How do I find every snapshot I am paying for?
The console filters snapshots by owner, but only per region, and orphaned snapshots live in the regions nobody checks. The AWS CLI with describe-snapshots and --owner-ids self, looped across every region, is the reliable way to do it by hand.
Keep reading
Prices checked against AWS list rates on 2 August 2026. AWS changes prices; treat every figure here as a close approximation rather than a quote.
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