How it works...

The accuracy of the calculator is completely dependent on your ability to forecast your requirements and usage—not an easy thing to do when you first start using AWS!

Unfortunately, not all AWS services are present in the calculator (a notable exception is AWS Lambda). For those services, you will have to do your own calculations based on the service-specific pricing pages.

The cost of services and resources can vary from region to region. In general, the us-east-1 region is the cheapest, and also has the most services (not all services are available in all regions), so use that if you want to know the lowest-cost option. Other regions' prices vary due to supply and demand, cost of operations, and undoubtedly many other reasons that AWS doesn't go in to.

Some services (for example, DynamoDB, Lambda, and so on) have a free tier that applies even if your account does not qualify for the standard free tier (that is, the account is more than 12 months old). These services will have a note on their specific calculator page detailing the inclusions:

Once completed, you can generate a specific URL for your estimation report that you can share with anyone. There's no authentication to access this URL, so don't put any sensitive information in your reports. The only protection is that the URL is unlikely to be guessed (given it's just the calculator site with a GUID parameter).