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... Answer from kingtheseus on reddit.com
Amazon Web Services
aws.amazon.com › machine learning › amazon sagemaker › pricing
SageMaker pricing - AWS
6 days ago - Gain unified access to all your data whether it’s stored in data lakes, data warehouses, or federated data sources, with governance built-in to meet your enterprise security needs. When using Amazon SageMaker, AWS will charge you the pricing for each AWS service that you use.
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 - Confused by AWS SageMaker pricing? This guide breaks down costs, real-world examples, and expert tips to forecast and optimize your SageMaker bill.
amazon web services - Which is lower cost, Sagemaker or EC2? - Stack Overflow
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. Cloud vendor lock in: free improvements in the open source projects in the future and better prices in competitor vendors are difficult to get. More on stackoverflow.com
Amazon Sagemaker pricing of cloudwatch - Stack Overflow
I've gone through the pricing page of Sagemaker at https://aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/pricing/. I could not find the information on how it charges the cost of emitting logs to cloudwatch. Does the pr... More on stackoverflow.com
Sagemaker Real Time Inference pricing clarification
Hello, Can you please help me to comprehend the pricing of Sagemaker Real time Inference? More on repost.aws
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December 20, 2022How to find out what is driving high Sagemaker costs
Hey all, Despite not running any kernels or analytics, our Sagemaker costs are very high. How do I determine what is driving these costs? Our cost analytics tell us that these are all driven by S... More on repost.aws
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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!
JFrog ML
qwak.com › post › the-hidden-cost-of-sagemaker
Uncovering The Hidden Costs Behind Sagemaker's Pricing | JFrog ML
On top of breaking down the different products offered and the cost structure entailed, we'll take a look at the complexity that comes with this offering and how SageMaker's pricing can easily skyrocket accordingly.
LocalStack
localstack.cloud › pricing
LocalStack Pricing
Review LocalStack's pricing for powerful local cloud development features. See how our plans support individual developers and enterprise teams.
Medium
medium.com › @darya_petrashka › aws-sagemaker-how-not-spend-all-your-money-16ea1e3e7255
AWS SageMaker: How not Spend all Your Money | by Darya Petrashka | Medium
July 13, 2022 - As an example, several months ago I spent $0.89 for SageMaker (by running several example notebooks). As you can see on the screenshot above, different instances have different prices, and the more advantageous instance the higher price. Keep in mind that the price also depends on the region you chose.
Top answer 1 of 5
41
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.
Finout
finout.io › blog › amazon-sagemaker-basics-pricing-and-cost-optimization-tips
Amazon SageMaker Pricing: Options, Examples, and 7 Ways to Cut Costs
September 11, 2025 - Amazon SageMaker pricing is based on your usage of various services and features. You'll be charged for compute instances, storage, data transfer, and other services used during training, hosting, and data processing. There are different pricing models like on-demand and Savings Plans.
TutorialsPoint
tutorialspoint.com › sagemaker › sagemaker-pricing.htm
Amazon SageMaker - Pricing
Amazon SageMaker pricing is based on a pay-as-you-go model, which means you only need to pay for the resources you use. The pricing depends on the different components of the machine learning workflow.
AWSstatic
d1.awsstatic.com › training-and-certification › docs-cloud-practitioner › AWS-Certified-Cloud-Practitioner_Exam-Guide.pdf pdf
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) Exam Guide Introduction
example, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Lex, Amazon Kendra) • Identifying the services for data analytics (for example, Amazon Athena, Amazon · Kinesis, AWS Glue, Amazon QuickSight) Version 1.0 CLF-C02 · 10 | PAGE · Task Statement 3.8: Identify services from other in-scope AWS service categories.
AWS re:Post
repost.aws › questions › QUaxWgMnwrSaq9IYZ5L0G1SA › sagemaker-real-time-inference-pricing-clarification
Sagemaker Real Time Inference pricing clarification | AWS re:Post
December 20, 2022 - Hello, Can you please help me to comprehend the pricing of Sagemaker Real time Inference? If I choose to go with instance ml.c7g.16xlarge(memory - 128 GiB, vCPUs - 64), suppose following is my payl...
Medium
medium.com › @tianjiaoliu2012 › mastering-cost-efficiency-with-aws-sagemaker-a-guide-to-saving-on-machine-learning-expenses-e51fe8038c7a
Mastering Cost Efficiency with AWS SageMaker: A Guide to Saving on Machine Learning Expenses | by Liz Liu | Medium
October 16, 2023 - If you’re eligible, make the most of the AWS Free Tier. This includes a certain amount of SageMaker usage at no cost. It’s an excellent way to experiment with SageMaker and keep your initial costs down.
Strands Agents
strandsagents.com › latest
Strands Agents
Strands leverages model reasoning to plan, orchestrate tasks, and reflect on goals · Work with any LLM provider - Amazon Bedrock, OpenAI, Anthropic, local models. Switch providers without changing your code
Pump
pump.co › home › blog › aws sagemaker pricing & savings guide
AWS SageMaker Pricing & Savings Guide
September 27, 2024 - This provision has proven to be quite advantageous since one can rent Studio Classic for as low as $0.05 per hour on a pay-as-you-go model. SageMaker is equally beneficial in that it charges by the second for any period of resource utilization ...
CloudZero
cloudzero.com › home › blog › amazon sagemaker pricing guide: 2025 costs (and savings)
Amazon SageMaker Pricing Guide: 2025 Costs (And Savings)
August 15, 2025 - The following table shows SageMaker Studio Notebooks and RStudio on SageMaker prices in the US East (Ohio) region using mid-size instance sizes:
AWS
docs.aws.amazon.com › amazon sagemaker › developer guide › deploy models for inference › best practices › inference cost optimization best practices
Inference cost optimization best practices - Amazon SageMaker AI
These plans automatically apply to eligible SageMaker AI ML instance usages including SageMaker Studio Classic Notebook, SageMaker On-Demand Notebook, SageMaker Processing, SageMaker Data Wrangler, SageMaker Training, SageMaker Real-Time Inference, and SageMaker Batch Transform regardless of instance family, size, or Region. For example, you can change usage from a CPU ml.c5.xlarge instance running in US East (Ohio) to a ml.Inf1 instance in US West (Oregon) for inference workloads at any time and automatically continue to pay the Savings Plans price.
Udemy
udemy.com › it & software › it certifications › aws certified ai practitioner
[NEW] Ultimate AWS Certified AI Practitioner AIF-C01 | Udemy
Learn the key AWS AI services, including a deep dive on Bedrock, Amazon Q and SageMaker
Top answer 1 of 3
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I'd suggest you to go to Cost Explorer and see what you find there
1. Go to Cost Explorer
2. Choose Dimension as Usage Type
3. Select Service as Sagemaker
4. Apply filter Usage Type
See, what this shows for that same time period. Next, change the filter from "Usage Type" to "API Operation" and see what are the contributors. Keep doing the same exercise by chaanging the filters to Region, Availability Zone, Charge Type. One or the other filter would definitely give you the lead where that charge is coming from.
Additional Reference: Sagemaker Pricing
Comment here if you have additional questions, happy to assist.
Abhishek
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Have you used Cost Explorer to review all SageMaker-related cost. You can just set SageMaker under the Service filter, then group by "Usage Type".
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.