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EBS snapshot cost estimator
Snapshots get created automatically and deleted never, billing $0.05 per GB-month the whole time. On the account we scanned, twenty snapshots across two regions were still charging for volumes deleted years ago, the oldest dating from September 2020.
EC2 console → Snapshots → sum of sizes, or check the EBS line on your bill.
Snapshots of deleted volumes, old AMIs, anything past your retention policy.
Snapshots cost you
$100.00/month
$1,200.00/year · ≈ £78/month
Cleanup saving
$60.00/month
$720.00/year · ≈ £47/month
$0.05/GB-month standard tier. Snapshots rarely archived: the archive tier is 75% cheaper but has a 90-day minimum and slower restores — right for compliance copies, wrong for your nightly backups.
Counting snapshots by hand is miserable — the free scan inventories them in every region, flags the orphans whose volume no longer exists, and prices each one.
Estimate the whole billHow snapshot bills grow
- →Backup scripts without expiry. The cron job that snapshots nightly took an afternoon to set up. The lifecycle rule to delete the old ones never got written, so the storage grows in a straight line forever.
- →Terminated instances leave orphans. Terminating an instance deletes its volumes (usually) but never its snapshots. Every decommissioned server leaves a small billed legacy.
- →AMIs pin snapshots invisibly. Every custom AMI holds one or more snapshots. An old golden image keeps its storage billed until the AMI is deregistered and the snapshots are deleted. That is two steps, and the second one is the one everybody forgets.
- →Pre-migration safety copies. Snapshotting everything before an upgrade is good practice. Deleting those snapshots once the upgrade has held for a month is the step that never happens.
- →High-churn volumes inflate chains. Database and log volumes rewrite blocks constantly, so their incremental snapshots are barely incremental. These are the chains worth auditing first.
Frequently asked questions
How much do EBS snapshots cost?
$0.05 per GB-month in the standard tier. That sounds small until you realise snapshots accumulate: a nightly job snapshotting 500 GB for two years without lifecycle rules can quietly build terabytes of billed storage.
Aren’t snapshots incremental? Why is my bill so big?
A snapshot only stores the blocks that changed since the previous one, but every unique block in the chain keeps billing until every snapshot referencing it has gone. Databases and log disks rewrite blocks constantly, so their incremental chains are barely incremental and grow fast.
What is an orphaned snapshot?
One whose source volume or AMI no longer exists. Terminated instances, deregistered AMIs and old migrations all leave them behind. They restore nothing anyone needs and they bill at the full rate. Most accounts over a year old are carrying some.
Is it safe to delete old snapshots?
Deleting a snapshot never touches the live volume, and EBS keeps any blocks still needed by other snapshots in the chain, so removing ones from the middle is safe. The one thing to watch is a snapshot backing a registered AMI, which needs the AMI deregistered first.
How do I stop this happening again?
Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager is free and handles both creation and expiry, for example daily snapshots kept a fortnight and weekly ones kept two months. It takes about ten minutes to set up and the accumulation stops for good.