I'll address your questions for both SageMaker Studio JupyterLab and SageMaker Notebook Instances:
A) SageMaker Studio JupyterLab:
1. SageMaker Studio is billed per second of usage, with a minimum of 1 minute. This means if you use Studio for just one minute, you'll be charged for that minute, not a full hour. The billing starts when you launch the SageMaker Studio application and ends when you log out or when an administrator ends your session.
2. In SageMaker Studio, each user gets their own dedicated workspace instance. If multiple data scientists are working in Studio, they would each have their own session and be billed separately. There isn't a concept of sharing the same Studio session among multiple users in the way you described.
B) SageMaker Notebook Instance:
1. SageMaker Notebook Instances are also billed per second of usage, with a minimum of 1 minute. Like Studio, if you use a Notebook Instance for just one minute, you'll be charged for that minute, not a full hour.
2. For Notebook Instances, multiple users can technically share the same instance, but it's not designed for simultaneous use by multiple users. If two users are using the same Notebook Instance, you would still be charged based on the instance type and the total time it's running, not per user. So in your example with an ml.t3.16xlarge instance used for one hour, the charge would be $1 (assuming that's the correct rate), regardless of whether one or two users were using it.
It's important to note that while sharing a Notebook Instance is possible, it's generally not recommended for collaborative work due to potential conflicts and security concerns. SageMaker Studio is better suited for multi-user environments, where each user gets their own workspace.
In both cases, you only pay for the compute resources you use, and there are no additional charges for using the SageMaker Studio or Notebook Instance interfaces themselves.
**Sources**
Amazon SageMaker Studio pricing - Amazon SageMaker AI
Machine Learning Service – Amazon SageMaker Pricing – AWS
Community | Enhancing ML Efficiency with Amazon SageMaker Answer from re:Post Agent on repost.aws
Amazon Web Services
aws.amazon.com › machine learning › amazon sagemaker › pricing
SageMaker pricing - AWS
5 days ago - Fine-grained permissions, powered by AWS Lake Formation, are provided at no extra cost. For the most accurate and detailed pricing information, consult lakehouse pricing. SageMaker AI follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model with no upfront commitments or minimum fees. The key pricing dimensions for SageMaker AI include instance usage (compute resources used in training, hosting, and notebook instances), storage (Amazon SageMaker notebooks, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes, and Amazon S3), data processing jobs, model deployment, and MLOps (Amazon SageMaker Pipelines and Model Monitor).
nOps
nops.io › blog › sagemaker-pricing-the-essential-guide
SageMaker Pricing: The Essential Guide | nOps
November 18, 2025 - SageMaker Unified Studio doesn’t have a standalone price, but it’s not “free.” You are billed for the underlying resources it runs—such as notebooks, training instances, inference endpoints, EFS storage, and Data Wrangler sessions. Understand and optimize 100% of your AWS, multicloud, ...
SageMaker Studio & Notebook Instance Pricing Questions
Hi Everyone, I have some questions regarding the cost structure for different SageMaker components, specifically: A) SageMaker Studio JupyterLab B) SageMaker Notebook Instance For **each**, I’d ... More on repost.aws
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February 16, 2025amazon web services - Which is lower cost, Sagemaker or EC2? - Stack Overflow
Cloud vendor lock in: free improvements ... better prices in competitor vendors are difficult to get. Why don't AWS invest developers in JupyterLab, they have done limited work in open source. Find some great points here, where people have experienced companies using as few AWS services as possible with good effect. SageMaker instances are currently ... More on stackoverflow.com
How to do cost estimation for Amazon Sagemaker
If you're bringing your own model, you don't need to use SageMaker. I've got mixtral-8x7b.Q5_K_M running on a g5.2xlarge (24GB of VRAM, 32 GB RAM), and it's $1.212 per hour in us-east-1. Just be sure to pick the Ubuntu deep learning AMI, as it has the required GPU drivers. Be aware that you're paying for the server whenever it's running - not just when you're interacting with the model. If you forget to shut it off and leave it for a month, that's $860... More on reddit.com
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March 15, 2024SageMaker costs for AI model
This recommendation was generated using AWS Generative AI capabilities. You are responsible for evaluating the recommendation in your specific context and implementing appropriate oversight and safeguards. Learn more · Thank you for providing details about your SageMaker deployment. I'll explain the pricing structure and address your questions. For your deployment using an ml.g5.xlarge instance... More on repost.aws
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March 18, 2025Amazon Web Services
aws.amazon.com › machine learning › amazon sagemake ai › amazon sagemaker canvas pricing
No-code Machine Learning - Amazon SageMaker Canvas Pricing - AWS
5 days ago - The training charge for custom ... SageMaker. Based on the instances used from SageMaker Canvas, the training price will range from $2.03 - $4.89 per hour of training time....
CloudZero
cloudzero.com › home › blog › amazon sagemaker pricing guide: 2025 costs (and savings)
Amazon SageMaker Pricing Guide: 2025 Costs (And Savings)
August 15, 2025 - Ultimately, the amount you pay with a SageMaker Savings Plan depends on the SageMaker component, payment plan, AWS region, and your commitment period (one or three years). You can see how SageMaker calculates your bill in the next section. The SageMaker On-Demand pricing is based on your requirements; the SageMaker features you use, the ML instance type, size, and region you choose, and the duration of use. The following table shows SageMaker Studio Notebooks and RStudio on SageMaker prices in the US East (Ohio) region using mid-size instance sizes:
AWS
aws.amazon.com › amazon ec2 › pricing › on-demand pricing
EC2 On-Demand Instance Pricing
5 days ago - See the Previous Generation Instances page. The pricing below is based on data transferred "in" to and "out" of Amazon EC2. If the Data Transfer per month is greater than 500 TB / month, please contact us. Rate tiers take into account your aggregate usage for Data Transfer Out to the Internet across Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon SES, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS ...
Saturn Cloud
saturncloud.io › sagemaker-pricing
Amazon SageMaker Pricing | Saturn Cloud
The details of Amazon SageMaker’s free tier pricing are in the table below. The Saturn Cloud price is the price per hour for the Saturn Cloud component, while the hosting price is the charge for the underlying AWS EC2 instances that the resources run on.
AWS
docs.aws.amazon.com › amazon sagemaker › developer guide › machine learning environments offered by amazon sagemaker ai › amazon sagemaker studio › amazon sagemaker studio classic › use amazon sagemaker studio classic notebooks › available resources for amazon sagemaker studio classic notebooks › instance types available for use with amazon sagemaker studio classic notebooks
Instance Types Available for Use With Amazon SageMaker Studio Classic Notebooks - Amazon SageMaker AI
. For information about pricing for these instance types, see Amazon EC2 Pricing ... For information about available Amazon SageMaker Notebook Instance types, see CreateNotebookInstance.
Cloudforecast
cloudforecast.io › home › aws pricing & cost optimization › aws sagemaker pricing guide – cost breakdown & optimization tips
AWS SageMaker Pricing Guide - Cost Breakdown & Optimization Tips | CloudForecast
October 29, 2025 - For example, you could use AWS CloudWatch to track key usage metrics for your instances. Set usage thresholds and alarms to let CloudWatch notify you of potential improvements you can make to your instance choices. If you have predictable workloads and can commit to SageMaker over an extended period of time (typically at least 1-3 years), a Machine Learning Savings Plan can significantly lower your costs compared to on-demand pricing.
Cloudchipr
cloudchipr.com › blog › amazon-sagemaker-pricing
Amazon SageMaker AI Pricing: Detailed Breakdown and Ultimate Guide
For example, if you start with a ml.c5.xlarge CPU instance in US East (Ohio) and later switch to a ml.inf1 GPU instance in US West (Oregon) for inference tasks, your Savings Plans will continue to apply the discounted rate automatically. This ensures consistent savings regardless of changes in your instance types or regions. For more information, visit the AWS SageMaker Pricing Page or use the AWS SageMaker Pricing Calculator to estimate your potential savings.
Top answer 1 of 5
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I've listed some pros and cons from experience...
..., as opposed to marketing materials. If I were to guess, I'd say you have a much higher chance to experience all the drawbacks of SageMaker, than any one of the benefits.
Drawbacks
- Cloud vendor lock in: free improvements in the open source projects in the future and better prices in competitor vendors are difficult to get. Why don't AWS invest developers in JupyterLab, they have done limited work in open source. Find some great points here, where people have experienced companies using as few AWS services as possible with good effect.
- SageMaker instances are currently 40% more expensive than their EC2 equivalent.
- Slow startup, it will break your workflow if every time you start the machine, it takes ~5 minutes. SageMaker Studio apparently speeds this up, but not without other issues. This is completely unacceptable when you are trying to code or run applications.
- SageMaker Studio is the first thing they show you when you enter SageMaker console. It should really be the last thing you consider.
- SageMaker Studio is more limited than SageMaker notebook instances. For example, you cannot mount an EFS drive.I spoke to a AWS solutions architect, and he confirmed this was impossible (after looking for the answer all over the internet). It is also very new, so there is almost no support on it, even by AWS developers.
- Worsens the disorganised Notebooks problem. Notebooks in a file system can be much easier to organise than using JupyterLab. With SageMaker Studio, a new volume gets created and your notebooks lives in there. What happens when you have more than 1...
- Awful/ limited terminal experience, coupled with tedious configuration (via Lifecycle configuration scripts, which require the Notebook to be turned off just to edit these scripts). Additionally, you cannot set any lifecycle configurations for Studio Notebooks.
- SageMaker endpoints are limited compared to running your own server in an EC2 instance.
- It may seem like it allows you to skip certain challenges, but in fact it provides you with more obscure challenges that no one has solved. Good luck solving them. The rigidity of SageMaker and lack of documentation means lots of workarounds and pain. This is very expensive.
Benefits
These revolve around the SageMaker SDK (the Sagemaker console and SageMaker SDK) (please comment or edit if you found any more benefits)
- Built in algorithms (which you can easily just import in your machine learning framework of choice): I would say this is worse than using open source alternatives.
- Training many models easily during hyperparameter search YouTube video by AWS (a fast way to spend money)
- Easily create machine learning related AWS mechanical turk tasks. However, mturk is very limited within SageMaker, so youre better off going to mturk yourself.
My suggestion
If you're thinking about ML on the cloud, don't use SageMaker. Spin up a VM with a prebuilt image that has PyTorch/ TensorFlow and JupyterLab and get the work done.
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You are correct about EC2 being cheaper than Sagemaker. However you have to understand their differences.
- EC2 provides you computing power
- Sagemaker (try to) provides a fully configured environment and computing power with a seamless deployment model for you to start training your model on day one
If you look at Sagemaker's overview page, it comes with Jupyter notebooks, pre-installed machine learning algorithms, optimized performance, seamless rollout to production etc.
Note that this is the same as self-hosting a EC2 MYSQL server and utilizing AWS managed RDS MYSQL. Managed services always appears to be more expensive, but if you factor in the time you have to spent maintaing server, updating packages etc., the extra 30% cost may be worth it.
So in conclusion if you rather save some money and have the time to set up your own server or environment, go for EC2. If you do not want to be bothered with these work and want to start training as soon as possible, use Sagemaker.
AWS
calculator.aws
AWS Pricing Calculator
AWS Pricing Calculator lets you explore AWS services, and create an estimate for the cost of your use cases on AWS.
CloudOptimo
cloudoptimo.com › home › blog › mastering amazon sagemaker pricing
Mastering Amazon SageMaker Pricing
March 13, 2025 - This includes hours for training and inference, and access to basic features and instance types. The Free Tier is an excellent way for newcomers to explore SageMaker’s capabilities and assess its fit for their projects without incurring costs. ... Hybrid Pricing: You can combine different pricing models to optimize costs for various workloads within your project. Cost Calculator: Use the AWS Cost Calculator to estimate potential costs based on your projected usage.
Amazon Web Services
aws.amazon.com › amazon sagemaker ai
Machine Learning Service - Free Amazon SageMaker AI - AWS
5 days ago - ✔ Amazon SageMaker AI is available for free, for 2 months, as part of the AWS Free Tier program.
Holori
holori.com › accueil › blog › ultimate aws sagemaker pricing guide
Holori - Ultimate AWS Sagemaker pricing guide
October 23, 2024 - Here’s what the free tier includes: Studio Notebooks and Notebook Instances: 250 hours of ml.t3.medium instance on Studio notebooks OR 250 hours of ml.t2.medium or ml.t3.medium instance on notebook instances per month for the first two months.
Concurrencylabs
concurrencylabs.com › blog › sagemaker-ai-cost-savings
How To Keep SageMaker AI Cost Under Control and Avoid Bad Billing Surprises when doing Machine Learning in AWS - Concurrency Labs
December 4, 2024 - They deliver savings that can range from approximately 25% to as much as 65%, depending on the component and instance type as well as the payment option (no upfront, partial upfront, all upfront) and commitment period (1 year or 3 years).
Amazon Web Services
amazonaws.cn › en › sagemaker › pricing
SageMaker Pricing
5 days ago - She uploads a dataset of 100 GB in S3 as input for the processing job, and the output data which is roughly the same size is stored back in S3. The sub-total for Amazon SageMaker Processing job = ¥ 2.978; The sub-total for 200 GB of general purpose SSD storage = ¥ 0.0242; The total price ...
AWS
docs.aws.amazon.com › amazon sagemaker › developer guide › machine learning environments offered by amazon sagemaker ai › amazon sagemaker studio › amazon sagemaker studio pricing
Amazon SageMaker Studio pricing - Amazon SageMaker AI
October 16, 2025 - Learn about pricing considerations for Amazon SageMaker Studio.
Reddit
reddit.com › r/aws › how to do cost estimation for amazon sagemaker
r/aws on Reddit: How to do cost estimation for Amazon Sagemaker
March 15, 2024 -
Hey guys, I am trying to do some cost estimation in Sagemaker for an AI chatbot I am building. The AI chatbot will be using the Mixtral-8x7b-Instruct quantized model downloaded from Hugging Face. And I will be using Sagemaker endpoints for inference.
When I went into the AWS Pricing Calculator website (https://calculator.aws/#/) and selected Sagemaker, I was presented with different options to choose from like Sagemaker Studio Notebooks, RStudio on Sagemaker, SageMaker On-Demand Notebook Instances etc (see the link below).
https://imgur.com/a/KVSHINe
For my chatbot that I had described above, how would I know which of these options to select to do my pricing estimate?
Would really appreciate any help with this. Many thanks!
AWS re:Post
repost.aws › questions › QUTgC3561MQKaWwyazLh_YXQ › sagemaker-costs-for-ai-model
SageMaker costs for AI model | AWS re:Post
March 18, 2025 - This recommendation was generated using AWS Generative AI capabilities. You are responsible for evaluating the recommendation in your specific context and implementing appropriate oversight and safeguards. Learn more · Thank you for providing details about your SageMaker deployment. I'll explain the pricing structure and address your questions. For your deployment using an ml.g5.xlarge instance, you will be charged based on the time your endpoint is running, regardless of whether it's processing requests or idle.