Free calculator
gp2 → gp3 savings calculator
gp3 is 20% cheaper than gp2 for identical storage, and faster for any volume under 1 TB. It launched in 2020 and most accounts still run mostly gp2, because nothing migrates itself.
Add up the size of every gp2 volume — attached or not. Unattached gp2 bills too.
On gp2 today
$50.00/month
$600.00/year · ≈ £39/month
Same storage on gp3
$40.00/month
$480.00/year · ≈ £31/month
Your saving
$10.00/month
$120.00/year · ≈ £8/month · 20% off, like for like
$0.10/GB-month for gp2 vs $0.08/GB-month for gp3. Most volumes migrate live with zero downtime via Elastic Volumes.
Don’t know your total gp2 footprint? The free scan lists every gp2 volume in every region, with the exact saving per volume — plus 70+ other checks.
Estimate the whole billWhy gp2 volumes pile up
- →gp2 was the default for a decade. Every instance launched before ~2021, every old AMI, every copy-pasted CloudFormation template creates gp2. New infrastructure quietly inherits it.
- →Root volumes get forgotten. People tune their data volumes and leave the root volume at whatever the launch default was, which is almost always gp2.
- →Unattached volumes bill too. Detached gp2 volumes from terminated instances keep billing at the full rate. Those are candidates for deletion, not just migration.
- →The saving compounds with rightsizing. Oversized volumes are common, such as a 500 GB volume sitting 12% full. Shrink it first by snapshotting and restoring into a smaller volume, then migrate. Both savings stack.
Frequently asked questions
How much cheaper is gp3 than gp2?
gp3 is $0.08 per GB-month against $0.10 for gp2, so a flat 20% off every gigabyte. A 500 GB volume drops from $50 a month to $40. Across a fleet that adds up quickly, and it keeps saving every month afterwards.
Is gp3 slower than gp2?
For most volumes it is faster. Every gp3 volume gets a 3,000 IOPS / 125 MB/s baseline regardless of size. gp2 scales IOPS with size (3 IOPS per GB), so any gp2 volume under 1 TB actually gains performance by moving to gp3.
Is there downtime when migrating gp2 to gp3?
No. EBS Elastic Volumes lets you change the volume type live, while the volume stays attached and in use. It is a single ModifyVolume call or a few clicks in the console. The volume goes through an "optimizing" state but stays fully usable.
When is gp3 not a straight win?
Volumes over 1 TB that genuinely need more than 3,000 IOPS have to provision the extra on gp3, at $0.005 per IOPS-month above the baseline, which eats into the 20%. That affects a small minority of volumes, so check the CloudWatch IOPS metrics before you migrate the big ones.
Why has AWS not migrated my volumes automatically?
AWS does not change your resources for you, and gp2 is still the default in older tooling, AMIs and copied CloudFormation templates. That is why accounts keep accumulating gp2 volumes years after gp3 launched in 2020.