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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 ...
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Quora
quora.com › Can-I-stay-under-5-a-month-on-AWS-EC2
Can I stay under 5$ a month on AWS EC2? - Quora
Rather go for 1 year free usage or use t2.micro instance with 1GB RAM, 1 VCPU at $9.50 per month New Low Cost EC2 Instances with Burstable Performance. You can also calculate your minimum billing using our Cloud ROI Calculator | Cloud Cost ...
Discussions

Monthly cost of EC2 T2-micro, email quotes for a small business.

You have taken a look at AWS's monthly calculator, right?

I'd also reconsider using t3 instances instead of t2 - slightly cheaper, and they offer bursting without having to do any stuff to enable it.

Then again, it may actually be more cost effective to have a serverless design here with those tiny volumes - serve static assets on page via CloudFront, and have a Lambda function attached via API gateway that makes a call to Amazon SES to send outgoing.

More on reddit.com
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December 20, 2017
amazon ec2 set max cost per month - Stack Overflow
I see a lot of questions that are similar but no direct answer. I just want to play around with an instance to run some light hourly data aggregation and familiarize myself with the ec2 instances. ... More on stackoverflow.com
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how can I get the cost for EACH EC2 instance?
You can enable Resource-level data in Cost Explorer which will give you the last 14 days of usage per resource. You can set up Data Exports which will export your data to S3. You can then query the data with Athena or set up the Quicksight Dashboard. Make sure to enable the feature "Include resource IDs". ... You can follow these steps to get your per-instance charge. ... --> Granularity = Monthly --> Dimension - Resource --> Service = EC2... More on repost.aws
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December 11, 2023
EC2 cost in a month
EC2 instances are paid by the amount of time they are turned on. 1-hour cost $0.044, 1-month is aprox $32. You can see it clearly here https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/t3.medium?currency=USD&duration=monthly So it doesn't matter if the instance is receiving requests or not, as long as it is on, you are paying for it. Theen, you have all the other small charges, like data transfered from your instance to the outside, public IPs in use, etc, and some others not so small, like if you deployed a Load Balancer in front of your instance, that's hourly cost as well. You can ask Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT, about the break down of costs of what you created, they can probably give you a good understanding about it. More on reddit.com
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August 2, 2025
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Apptio
apptio.com › blog › guide-to-aws-ec2-costs
Definitive Guide to AWS EC2 Pricing and How to Control Costs
June 16, 2025 - Paying on-demand for this instance runs at $0.192 an hour. A one-year EC2 Instance SP with partial upfront payment will cost $530 upfront and $44.15 per month for a total of $1,060.
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/aws › monthly cost of ec2 t2-micro, email quotes for a small business.
r/aws on Reddit: Monthly cost of EC2 T2-micro, email quotes for a small business.
December 20, 2017 -

Good afternoon,

I'm helping out a friend. He has a moving company and I am about to create 5 websites for 5 different areas in the city for him.

The websites would be SPA, built in react, but otherwise static. The main feature he needs is for visitors to fill out a quote that will be emailed to him.

My current idea is to serve websites straight through S3, and build a single simple node server with middleware and API handler for each site. Is this architecture worth it? The traffic would be minimal, probably 1-50 hits a day at most. How much am I expecting him to be billed for running this thing 24/7? Is there other solution that would fit this need better, that I am not aware of?

I know Netlify has free hosting for such complexity and they have form handler for static websites but it is limited to 100 emails for a free tier.

Thank you!

TL:DR // How much would it cost to run T2-micro 24/7 with Node server that will handle no more than 100 API calls a day?

Top answer
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You have taken a look at AWS's monthly calculator, right?

I'd also reconsider using t3 instances instead of t2 - slightly cheaper, and they offer bursting without having to do any stuff to enable it.

Then again, it may actually be more cost effective to have a serverless design here with those tiny volumes - serve static assets on page via CloudFront, and have a Lambda function attached via API gateway that makes a call to Amazon SES to send outgoing.

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4

The cost would basically be the sum of:

  • EC2 Instance costs (per hour)

  • EBS block store costs (per GB-month)

  • S3 storage costs (per GB)

  • Data transfer costs (per GB + per operation)

A t2.micro instance costs about $0.0116 per hour in US-East—multiply by 750 to get a rough monthly estimate, so about $8.70 per month.

... but there's a free tier!

There is a 12-month free tier that covers the cost of running a t2.micro instance for a year, so if it's a new AWS account you shouldn't need to pay for the EC2 instance the first year.

EBS also has a free tier (covering the first 30 GB, 2 million I/Os and 1 GB of snapshot storage), so it shouldn't cost anything at least in the first year assuming you don't exceed these thresholds.

S3 again also has a 12-month free tier, in this case covering 5 GB of standard storage, 20,000 GET requests and 2,000 Put Requests.. so it's possible you may not have to worry about S3 costs either if the traffic level is really as low as you claim.

And last but not least there is a 12-month free tier for data transfer as well that covers up to 15 GB of data transfer out (across all AWS services).

So it should be possible to run this application free of charge for the first year if your usage is low enough, but once the free tier expires there will be some costs like ~$10/month or around there if you stay at about the same usage level.

Lambda

An alternative to consider is using Lambda which will execute your code on-demand without having to keep a server instance running all the time. Lambda will quickly spin up one or multiple instances to handle whatever demand you have and you only get charged when Lambda needs to be invoked to execute your code.

Lambda is also part of AWS' permanent free tier, so you can continue using Lambda for free (up to 1 Million invocations per month) with no expiration date. By switching from an always-on instance to a serverless Lambda setup, you can potentially reduce the total monthly cost (after the 12-month free tier expires) to just pennies.

Lightsail

Lightsail is an alternative to AWS' EC2 service which packages server instances together with storage, data transfer, DNS management, etc. so you just pay one low monthly price and that should cover everything you need to host basic websites. Lightsail plans start at $3.50 per month which includes a single core 0.5 GB RAM server instance with 20 GB storage and 1 TB of monthly data transfer. Lightsail is free for the first month.

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AWS
aws.amazon.com › compute › amazon ec2 › pricing
Amazon EC2 – Secure and resizable compute capacity – AWS
5 days ago - There are three ways to pay for Amazon EC2 instances: On-Demand, Savings Plans, and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. Learn more about each.
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Economize
economize.cloud › resources › aws › pricing › ec2 › t2.small
t2.small pricing: $16.79 monthly - AWS EC2
5 days ago - Last updated: December 18, 2025The t2.small instance is in the T2 General purpose family with 1 vCPUs and 2 GiB of memory, pricing starts at $0.02 per hour and $16.79 per month in us-east-1 region.
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AWS
aws.amazon.com › amazon ec2 › instance types › t2 instances
Amazon EC2 T2 Instances – Amazon Web Services (AWS)
5 days ago - T2 instances are Amazon EC2 instance ... available to use in the AWS Free Tier, which includes 750 hours of Linux and Windows t2.micro instances each month for one year for new AWS customers....
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Amazon EC2
instances.vantage.sh
Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison
CostHourly · Reserved/Savings Plan1-year - No Upfront · CurrencyUnited States Dollar ($) ColumnsColumns · CompareClear Filters · Export · Updated 12/22/2025, 4:14:01 PM · EC2Instances.info - Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison ·
Find elsewhere
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Finout
finout.io › blog › understanding-aws-pricing
Understanding AWS Pricing for EC2, S3, EBS, RDS, & More
May 22, 2025 - The AWS Free Tier provides new ... services at no cost for the first 12 months. It includes services like Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, and AWS Lambda. For example, users can run up to 750 hours of EC2 compute time per month using the t2.micro ...
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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.
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Economize
economize.cloud › resources › aws › pricing › ec2 › t3.medium
t3.medium pricing: $30.37 monthly - AWS EC2
On-Demand Monthly Cost · $30.37 · per month · Reserved - 1 year · $17.75 · per month · vCPUs · 2 · Memory · 4 GB · Machine Configuration (t3.medium) Region · us-east-1 · Currency · USD ($) Share · Family Instances Compare with ...
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CloudZero
cloudzero.com › home › blog › amazon ec2 pricing: how it works and how to save
Amazon EC2 Pricing: How It Works And How To Save
3 weeks ago - Other costs include egress data ... pricing includes a free tier that offers 750 hours of Linux or Windows t2.micro instances (or t3.micro where the t2 instance family is unavailable) per month for a year....
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ProsperOps
prosperops.com › home › aws ec2 pricing explained: how it works and optimization tips
AWS EC2 Pricing Explained: How It Works and Optimization Tips - ProsperOps
March 1, 2025 - Outbound to the internet: The first 100GB per month is free, then pricing follows a tiered model — after 150TB, a flat rate of $0.05/GB applies. Using CloudFront: No transfer cost between EC2 and CloudFront.
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AWS re:Post
repost.aws › questions › QUSe55fIsYQZq_78zOWsPzXw › how-can-i-get-the-cost-for-each-ec2-instance
how can I get the cost for EACH EC2 instance? | AWS re:Post
December 11, 2023 - You can enable Resource-level data in Cost Explorer which will give you the last 14 days of usage per resource. You can set up Data Exports which will export your data to S3. You can then query the data with Athena or set up the Quicksight Dashboard. Make sure to enable the feature "Include resource IDs". ... You can follow these steps to get your per-instance charge. ... --> Granularity = Monthly --> Dimension - Resource --> Service = EC2-Instances (Elastic Compute Cloud – Compute) --> EC2-Instances = Select the instance id that you wish to visualize in the report.
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AWS
aws.amazon.com › amazon ec2 pricing › reserved instances › pricing
EC2 Reserved Instance Pricing
5 days ago - With the Partial Upfront option, ... Reserved Instance term. The No Upfront option does not require any upfront payment and provides a discounted hourly rate for the duration of the term. Notice: Red Hat has made an update to their cloud pricing model for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). On July 1, 2024 pricing for EC2 RHEL changed to a per-vCPU-hour based pricing model. Learn about the new prices in the RHEL on AWS Pricing ...
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nOps
nops.io › blog › ec2-pricing-how-much-does-aws-ec2-really-cost
EC2 Pricing: How Much Does AWS EC2 Really Cost?
June 23, 2025 - If they pay no upfront fee, they can pay $13.51 in each of the 12 months for a total of $162.12. You can explore the AWS pricing table for updated prices. ... On-Demand prices let users pay as they go, offering flexibility and no upfront costs.
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Amazon Web Services
aws.amazon.com › compute › savings plans › compute and ec2 instance
Compute and EC2 Instance Savings Plans
5 days ago - AWS offers two types of Savings Plans: ... Compute Savings Plans provide the most flexibility and help to reduce your costs by up to 66%. These plans automatically apply to EC2 instance usage regardless of instance family, size, AZ, Region, OS or tenancy, and also apply to Fargate or Lambda usage.
Top answer
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Amazon EC2 servers are charged for each hour you use them. So a Small server in the us-east zone will cost 13 cents/hour or .13 * 24 * 30 = $93.60/month. It doesn't matter if you're using 10% of the CPU or 100%, it's the same hourly rate. If you have a long-term need for compute resources, you can save money by purchasing a one year or three year reserved instance. (by paying an upfront fee to "reserve" the instance, you can pay a lower hourly rate).

You'll also pay 12 cents per GB of outbound bandwidth (first GB is free, prices get cheaper above 10TB of data transfer)

Additionally, you'll pay for storage, if you have 100GB of storage allocated for the server, you'll pay 10 cents/GB-month, or 100 * .10 = $10/month for that storage.

You also pay $0.10 per million I/O requests. That's a bit harder to estimate, but tends to be minimal unless your server is doing a lot of I/O. You can minimize this cost by moving high I/O files to ephemeral block storage or even a tempfs memory based filesytem to reduce EBS disk I/O's.

The pricing is detailed here: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

And they have a usage cost calculator here: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html


If you have well defined peak and off-peak usage hours, you can save money by scaling your server usage to meet demand.

For example, one simple way to do this if you can stand some downtime, is to restart your server as a larger instance in the morning to cover peak demand, then restart it again as a smaller instance in the evening to handle the slow, off-peak hours. You can script this by using the AWS API.

To avoid downtime, you could use an AWS load balancer (there is a fee for this) and have 2 server instances - start up the big one during peak time and then shut down the small server, then during off-peak, start up your small server and then shut down the big one.

AWS also provides ways to monitor your server load and automatically scale your servers up and down to meet load, but this is probably overkill for a small site.

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EC2 Pricing Calculator
costcalc.cloudoptimo.com › aws-pricing-calculator › ec2 › t2.medium
t2.medium Pricing and Specs: AWS EC2
Explore the EC2 t2.medium instance type and its costs across various regions, empowering you to make informed decisions for your cloud deployment strategy.