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Aurora bills instance hours plus storage plus I/O — or storage at a 125% premium with I/O bundled (I/O-Optimized). Serverless v2 at $0.12 per ACU-hour wins on variable workloads, loses on steady traffic above 4 ACU. Global Database doubles the price per secondary region plus replicated-write fees. Backtrack adds per-change-record cost most teams never factor in.
Bedrock AgentCore is metered across twelve distinct components — Runtime, Browser, Code Interpreter, Gateway, Identity, Memory (two tiers), Observability, Evaluations, Payments, Search, and the underlying model spend. Two of them drive 80% of the bill.
CloudFront bills $0.085/GB egress in North America tiered down to $0.020/GB at extreme volume, plus $0.0075–$0.0100 per 10K requests, plus origin egress. Regional price classes drop the bill 30–60% by skipping expensive geographies. Real-time logs at $0.01 per million entries surprise high-traffic sites. Lambda@Edge is dramatically more expensive than CloudFront Functions.
CloudWatch bills across ten distinct dimensions — Logs ingestion at $0.50/GB, Logs storage, custom metrics with cardinality multipliers, alarms tiered by resolution and type, dashboards at $3 each, Synthetics canary runs, RUM events, X-Ray traces, Container Insights, and cross-region replication. Logs ingestion is the largest line on most accounts.
DynamoDB on-demand bills $1.25 per million writes and $0.25 per million reads — pay-per-request convenience with no capacity planning. Provisioned at $0.00065/WCU-hour wins on steady traffic above ~50% utilization. Every GSI doubles the write cost, IA tier cuts storage 60% but adds 25% to request fees, and Global Tables compound the bill per region.
EBS is billed across six dimensions — gp3 storage at $0.08/GB-month, separate IOPS and throughput line items, io2 Block Express, snapshots at $0.05/GB-month, fast snapshot restore at $0.75/DSU-hour. Deleting an EC2 instance never stops the volume bill, and the gp2→gp3 migration is one of the cleanest 20% wins in cloud cost.
ECR storage is $0.10/GB-month — twice S3 Standard. Cross-region replication doubles or triples that. Enhanced scanning bills $0.09 per image scanned, on every push. Pull-through caches for Docker Hub and ECR Public add storage plus data-transfer-in. A 200-service organization with 10 environments and 3 regions can spend more on ECR than on the EKS clusters pulling from it.
EFS Standard is $0.30/GB-month — over 13× S3 Standard. Standard-IA is 92% cheaper at $0.025; Archive is 99% cheaper at $0.0036. Elastic Throughput (the 2024 default) bills $0.03/GB read and $0.06/GB write per transfer. Throughput mode and storage class decisions, made once at provision time, control the bill more than any usage pattern.
EKS control planes are $73/month per cluster. Stay on a Kubernetes version beyond its 14-month standard support and Extended Support bills $0.60/cluster-hour — $438/month per cluster, a 6× multiplier vs standard. EKS Auto Mode adds a ~12% markup over standard EC2 + EBS for managed compute simplicity. The compute side (Karpenter, Spot, Graviton) is where most of the bill lives.
EventBridge looks like a $1/million-events service. It is actually six different billing dimensions — custom events, Pipes at $0.40/M, API Destinations at $0.20/M, Schema Discovery at $0.10/M, Archive at $0.10/GB-month, and cross-region replication that doubles the publish line. Built-in AWS-service events are free; custom buses are where the bill lives.
GuardDuty bills across nine separate data sources — CloudTrail management events at $4/M tiered down, VPC Flow Logs at $1/GB tiered, EKS Runtime Monitoring per vCPU-hour, plus S3, DNS, Lambda, RDS, and Malware Protection. The 30-day free trial regularly hides the true production bill, and organization-wide auto-enable turns every new account into a billing line.
Lightsail bundles compute, storage, and bandwidth into flat monthly prices starting at $3.50/month — dramatically cheaper than the equivalent EC2 + EBS + Data Transfer math for predictable small workloads. The trap: data transfer overages bill at $0.09/GB, scaling locks you into bundle tiers, and migration to EC2 is more disruptive than starting on EC2 from day one.