Ranges, not a number
How much does AWS cost per month?
Anybody quoting you a single figure has not asked enough questions. What is useful is a range for a shape of company, plus the handful of things that actually move it.
A hobby project on AWS costs roughly $5 to $50 a month. An early-stage startup with one production environment typically runs $200 to $2,000. A growing SaaS company with production, staging and a data pipeline is usually $2,000 to $15,000. A mid-sized company with multiple teams and environments is commonly $15,000 to $100,000. Within each band, the difference between the low and high end is mostly environment count and commitment coverage rather than traffic.
Realistic monthly ranges
| Shape of company | Typical monthly spend | What usually dominates |
|---|---|---|
| Side project, one small instance | $5 to $50 | One instance, one small database, a public IP and some storage |
| Pre-revenue startup, one environment | $200 to $2,000 | RDS, a couple of instances or containers, a NAT gateway, load balancer |
| Funded startup, prod plus staging | $2,000 to $8,000 | Duplicate environments, first data pipeline, logging growth |
| Growing SaaS, 20 to 60 engineers | $8,000 to $30,000 | Multiple environments, Kubernetes, analytics, backups, cross-AZ traffic |
| Mid-sized, multiple teams | $30,000 to $100,000+ | Account sprawl, data volume, and whatever the last two years of projects left behind |
Observed ranges for UK and EU companies rather than a pricing table. Any individual company can sit outside its band for perfectly good reasons.
The five things that actually move the number
- →How many environments you run around the clock. The most reliable predictor of a surprising bill. Three environments running 24/7 for a team that works 45 hours a week is roughly double what it needs to be.
- →Whether you have committed to anything. A steady baseline on pure on-demand pricing pays up to 30% more than the same workload under a one-year Savings Plan. Coverage of 0% is extremely common and it is a single purchase away from being fixed.
- →Data movement, not data storage. Storage is cheap and predictable. Moving data is neither. Internet egress from $0.09 per GB, cross-AZ at $0.01 per GB each way and NAT processing at $0.045 per GB add up in ways nobody models in advance.
- →Managed service premiums. EKS is $73 per cluster per month before a single node. Multi-AZ RDS doubles the instance cost. Each is a reasonable trade; the problem is buying them for staging.
- →Time. Snapshots, logs, S3 versions and orphaned volumes accumulate whether or not anyone ships. An account that has run for three years without a cleanup carries three years of residue.
A sanity check you can do now
Divide your monthly AWS bill by your number of engineers. Somewhere between $200 and $600 per engineer per month is unremarkable for a product company running its own infrastructure. Materially above that, with flat traffic, usually means environment sprawl or missing commitments rather than a demanding workload.
It is a rough heuristic and it breaks for data-heavy and ML companies, where the infrastructure is the product. Used as a prompt to look rather than as a verdict, it is a good one.
Put numbers on it
Frequently asked questions
Is AWS more expensive than other clouds?
List prices across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud are close enough that the difference is rarely the deciding factor, and all three discount heavily for commitment. What varies more is how easy each makes it to spend money without noticing. Migration to save on list price almost never repays the disruption; fixing the waste in the account you have almost always does.
What does the AWS Free Tier actually cover?
A rotating set of always-free allowances plus 12 months of specific free usage from account creation, notably 750 hours of a small EC2 instance and 750 hours of small RDS. The gap people fall into is that it expires on a date rather than at a threshold, so a bill can jump on an anniversary with no change in usage. NAT gateways and load balancers are not covered at all.
How do I forecast AWS costs before building?
The AWS Pricing Calculator is accurate for the things you remember to add and silent about the things you forget, which are usually data transfer, NAT processing, logs and snapshots. A useful rule is to price the architecture you have drawn, then add 30% for the parts you have not.
What is a reasonable target after optimisation?
For an account that has never been reviewed, cutting 20% to 30% without touching the architecture is normal. Beyond that you are into design changes with real trade-offs. An account already under active cost management should expect single digits, and treating that as failure is how teams end up breaking things to hit a number.
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.
£499 fixed. Free scan first. 20%+ found or it’s free.
The scan is read-only — a role you create and delete, no keys shared — and shows your estimated monthly saving before anyone talks about money.