FinOps
51 posts
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Step Functions pricing: the 2026 break-even
One Step Functions state transition costs the same as 24 seconds of Express duration. Past 12 states, Express caps out before Standard ever gets cheaper.
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SQS pricing in 2026: requests, not messages
SQS pricing bills a 1 MiB message as 16 requests, and ten short-polling consumers on an empty queue as $103 a month. Long polling makes it $0.12.
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Kinesis Data Streams pricing in 2026
An empty on-demand Kinesis stream costs $28.80 a month, which buys 2.67 shards. Above 3.6% shard utilisation, provisioned Kinesis is cheaper at any scale.
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Site-to-Site VPN pricing: $36 is 7% (2026)
An AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection is $36 a month, but in AWS's own example that is 6.87% of the bill. On a Transit Gateway the tunnel is metered three ways.
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Amazon Bedrock AgentCore pricing (2026)
Bedrock AgentCore bills CPU only when used, but memory until the session ends, 15 minutes after the last request by default. AWS's own example undercounts it.
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AWS Direct Connect pricing in 2026
A 1 Gbps AWS Direct Connect port is $219 a month and repays itself at 3,257 GB of data transfer out. The break-even table for every port speed, from AWS rates.
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AWS Backup pricing and where it bills (2026)
AWS Backup does not bill backup storage for EBS, EC2 or RDS: it lands under their own services. Plus cold storage minimums, copy charges and Audit Manager fees.
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AWS Global Accelerator pricing in 2026
An idle AWS Global Accelerator costs $25.20 a month, and DT-Premium is charged on top of data transfer out, not instead of it. Rates by region.
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Aurora Serverless v2 pricing: idle cost (2026)
An idle Aurora Serverless v2 cluster bills its minimum ACUs on every writer and reader. RDS Proxy, replication or one open connection stops it pausing to zero.
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CloudFront pricing: the S3 break-even (2026)
CloudFront is $0.085 per GB from US edges against $0.09 direct from S3, so CloudFront pricing undercuts S3 egress in two of eight regions and loses in six.
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S3 request pricing: the 18 KB line (2026)
One S3 GET a month costs more than a month of S3 Standard storage for any object under 18 KiB. S3 request pricing by class, with the crossover table.
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Amazon SES pricing and the plan default (2026)
New Amazon SES accounts start on Essentials at $0.16 per 1,000 emails, 60% above à la carte. Why that pays off only with VDM, plus the inbound chunk meter.
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S3 Intelligent-Tiering cost break-even (2026)
S3 Intelligent-Tiering monitoring costs $0.0025 per 1,000 objects a month, so under a 250 KB average object size it loses to plain S3 Standard.
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Cognito pricing: Lite, Essentials, Plus (2026)
Cognito Plus bills $0.020 per MAU with no free tier for direct sign-in, and a token refresh or AdminGetUser call makes a user active. All three plans compared.
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What S3 Glacier retrieval really costs (2026)
Restoring 10 TB from S3 Glacier Deep Archive costs $268, 2.2x a year of storage. S3 Glacier retrieval is three charges: per GB, per request, plus a copy.
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Reserved Instances vs Savings Plans (2026)
Savings Plans cannot reserve capacity or be resold. Two things Reserved Instances still do, and why AWS applies Reserved Instances first.
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Redshift Serverless pricing: the minute (2026)
Redshift Serverless bills a 60-second minimum per query, so a two-second dashboard query on the default 128-RPU workgroup costs 80 cents, not a fraction of one.
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API Gateway: REST vs HTTP API cost (2026)
API Gateway HTTP APIs are 3.5x cheaper per request until the payload passes 1.5 MB, where the 512 KB metering increment flips it.
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OpenSearch Serverless pricing: OCU floor 2026
An idle OpenSearch Serverless Classic collection bills a 2-OCU minimum: $350.40 a month at AWS's $0.24 OCU-hour. Only NextGen collections scale to zero.
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Cut Amazon Bedrock inference cost (2026)
Bedrock batch inference is 50% off, cache-read discounts vary by model, and AWS states batch and caching cannot be combined. Plus the silent caching failure.
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EKS Auto Mode: the third bill (2026)
EKS Auto Mode adds a management fee that varies by instance type, on top of EC2 and the control plane. And split cost allocation does not divide it.
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AWS Budgets vs Cost Anomaly Detection (2026)
They catch different failures, and only Budgets sees AWS Marketplace charges. Detection lags, monitor types, and what to run.
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How AWS credits actually apply (2026)
Soonest to expire first, largest charge first, biggest account first. Plus what credits will not cover, including Marketplace.
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EKS extended support: $0.10 to $0.60 (2026)
EKS extended support is six times the control plane rate, on a published date, enabled by default. Once a cluster is in it you cannot turn it off.
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AWS Cost Categories: split charge limits (2026)
Cost categories apply retroactively to the start of the month. Split charge results never reach the CUR or Cost Explorer.
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Does consolidated billing save money? (2026)
AWS's worked example puts consolidated billing's volume tiering at about 4%. Commitment sharing is worth far more than that.
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Secrets Manager vs Parameter Store (2026)
AWS prices 1,500 secrets at $604.50 a month in Secrets Manager. Standard Parameter Store parameters are free. Plus a tier change you cannot undo.
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AWS Cost Optimization Hub: the gaps (2026)
EKS spend counts toward Cost Optimization Hub's efficiency score but generates no recommendations, so a wasteful cluster raises the number.
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RDS extended support: priced per vCPU (2026)
RDS extended support scales with instance size, unlike EKS, and runs three years. Disabling it on a lapsed database upgrades the engine immediately.
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Do Lambda cold starts cost money? (2026)
Since 1 August 2025 every Lambda is billed for INIT, the cold start phase. What changed, how to measure it, what does not fix it.
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What Route 53 actually costs (2026)
Route 53 hosted zones are not prorated, alias queries to AWS services are free, and a Resolver endpoint is about $182 a month.
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EC2 Capacity Reservations: unused cost (2026)
An EC2 Capacity Reservation bills at full On-Demand whether used or not, and the idle half arrives as UnusedBox. Plus who pays when it is shared.
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DynamoDB on-demand vs provisioned (2026)
AWS publishes the DynamoDB break-even: on-demand costs less below 35% utilisation. Plus the console switch that deletes your auto scaling.
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Are AWS Glue crawlers free? (2026)
No. Glue crawlers bill $0.44 per DPU-hour with a 10-minute minimum per crawl, so an hourly schedule costs about $1,285 a year.
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EFS pricing: storage is the cheap half (2026)
EFS Standard storage is $0.30 per GB-month, but Elastic Throughput bills $0.03 per GB read and $0.06 written. EFS pricing flips to Provisioned near 6%.
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Savings Plans: coverage vs utilization (2026)
Savings Plans coverage and utilization move in opposite directions. What each low value means, and the documented order AWS applies discounts in.
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Does a stopped EC2 instance cost money? (2026)
A stopped EC2 instance bills no compute. The EBS volume, any Elastic IP and any Savings Plan under it do, and hibernating costs more.
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ECR pricing: storage is 13% of it (2026)
Amazon ECR storage is $0.10 per GB-month and same-Region pulls are free. Scanning and the network path are 87% of what an ECR pipeline really costs.
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AWS CloudTrail pricing and costs (2026)
CloudTrail's first copy of management events is free; the second costs $2.00 per 100,000, twenty times the rate of S3 data events.
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AWS Compute Optimizer cost in 2026
AWS Compute Optimizer is free, but its 93-day lookback is $0.25 per instance a month and memory visibility costs $0.30 more. Its own example halves its total.
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CloudWatch custom metrics cost in 2026
A CloudWatch custom metric is $0.30 a month, but AWS bills per unique dimension combination: one request-ID dimension at 100 rps bills $32,500 a month.
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AWS KMS key pricing at scale (2026)
A rotated key costs $3 a month, not $1. And S3 Bucket Keys cut KMS request charges by up to 99% with no code change.
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AWS tag policies do not require tags (2026)
A tag policy never blocks an untagged resource. Enforcement mode covers 343 of 1,493 resource types, and the tag still has to be activated to reach your bill.
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AWS free tier changes: what you get (2026)
The AWS free tier dropped its 12-month trials. A new account gets $100 at sign-up, $100 more to earn, and six months to spend it before AWS closes it.
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AWS data transfer out pricing in 2026
AWS data transfer out is $0.09 per GB after 100 GB free, but the blended egress rate rises until 10 TB a month and the $0.05 floor is never reachable.
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Why Cost Explorer and your CUR differ (2026)
Same dataset, three totals. The six documented causes, which number you owe, and what Cost Explorer charges per request.
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Amortized vs unblended cost in AWS (2026)
Five CUR cost columns, one right answer per question. When to use amortized, when unblended, and why blended cost is never the answer.
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What AWS Config actually costs (2026)
You are billed per configuration item, and AWS confirms one is recorded even when no resource is created. Churn is the driver.
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Limit what one Athena query can scan (2026)
Athena's per-query limit cancels; the per-workgroup limit only alerts. Cancelled queries are still billed and leave debris.
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What CloudWatch Logs actually cost (2026)
The CloudWatch Logs Infrequent Access class halves ingestion only, removes metric filters and alarms, and can never be changed after creation.
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Transit Gateway pricing and costs (2026)
Transit Gateway attachment hours land on the VPC owner, not the gateway owner, and three types bill three different accounts.