Q:  How will I be charged and billed for my use of Amazon S3?

There are no set-up fees or commitments to begin using the service. At the end of the month, your credit card will automatically be charged for that month’s usage. You can view your charges for the current billing period at any time on the Amazon Web Services web site, by logging into your Amazon Web Services account, and clicking “Account Activity” under “Your Web Services Account”.

With the AWS Free Usage Tier*, you can get started with Amazon S3 for free in all regions except the AWS GovCloud Region. Upon sign-up, new AWS customers receive 5 GB of Amazon S3 Standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, 2,000 Put Requests, 15GB of data transfer in, and 15GB of data transfer out each month for one year.

Amazon S3 charges you for the following types of usage. Note that the calculations below assume there is no AWS Free Tier in place.

Storage Used:

Amazon S3 storage pricing is summarized on the Amazon S3 Pricing page.

The volume of storage billed in a month is based on the average storage used throughout the month. This includes all object data and metadata stored in buckets that you created under your AWS account. We measure your storage usage in “TimedStorage-ByteHrs,” which are added up at the end of the month to generate your monthly charges.

Storage Example:

Assume you store 100GB (107,374,182,400 bytes) of data in Amazon S3 Standard in your bucket for 15 days in March, and 100TB (109,951,162,777,600 bytes) of data in Amazon S3 Standard for the final 16 days in March.

At the end of March, you would have the following usage in Byte-Hours: Total Byte-Hour usage = [107,374,182,400 bytes x 15 days x (24 hours / day)] + [109,951,162,777,600 bytes x 16 days x (24 hours / day)] = 42,259,901,212,262,400 Byte-Hours.

Let's convert this to GB-Months: 42,259,901,212,262,400 Byte-Hours / 1,073,741,824 bytes per GB / 744 hours per month = 52,900 GB-Months

This usage volume crosses two different volume tiers. The monthly storage price is calculated below assuming the data is stored in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region: 50 TB Tier: 51,200 GB x $0.023 = $1,177.60 50 TB to 450 TB Tier: 1,700 GB x $0.022 = $37.40

Total Storage Fee = $1,177.60 + $37.40 = $1,215.00

Network Data Transferred In:

Amazon S3 Data Transfer In pricing is summarized on the Amazon S3 Pricing page. This represents the amount of data sent to your Amazon S3 buckets. 

Network Data Transferred Out:

Amazon S3 Data Transfer Out pricing is summarized on the Amazon S3 Pricing page. For Amazon S3, this charge applies whenever data is read from any of your buckets from a location outside of the given Amazon S3 Region.

Data Transfer Out pricing rate tiers take into account your aggregate Data Transfer Out from a given region to the Internet across Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS and Amazon VPC. These tiers do not apply to Data Transfer Out from Amazon S3 in one AWS Region to another AWS Region.

Data Transfer Out Example:
Assume you transfer 1TB of data out of Amazon S3 from the US East (Northern Virginia) Region to the Internet every day for a given 31-day month. Assume you also transfer 1TB of data out of an Amazon EC2 instance from the same region to the Internet over the same 31-day month.

Your aggregate Data Transfer would be 62 TB (31 TB from Amazon S3 and 31 TB from Amazon EC2). This equates to 63,488 GB (62 TB * 1024 GB/TB).

This usage volume crosses three different volume tiers. The monthly Data Transfer Out fee is calculated below assuming the Data Transfer occurs in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region:
10 TB Tier: 10,239 GB (10×1024 GB/TB – 1 (free)) x $0.09 = $921.51
10 TB to 50 TB Tier: 40,960 GB (40×1024) x $0.085 = $3,481.60
50 TB to 150 TB Tier: 12,288 GB (remainder) x $0.070 = $860.16

Total Data Transfer Out Fee = $921.51+ $3,481.60 + $860.16= $5,263.27

Data Requests:

Amazon S3 Request pricing is summarized on the Amazon S3 Pricing Chart.

Request Example:
Assume you transfer 10,000 files into Amazon S3 and transfer 20,000 files out of Amazon S3 each day during the month of March. Then, you delete 5,000 files on March 31st.
Total PUT requests = 10,000 requests x 31 days = 310,000 requests
Total GET requests = 20,000 requests x 31 days = 620,000 requests
Total DELETE requests = 5,000×1 day = 5,000 requests

Assuming your bucket is in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region, the Request fees are calculated below:
310,000 PUT Requests: 310,000 requests x $0.005/1,000 = $1.55
620,000 GET Requests: 620,000 requests x $0.004/10,000 = $0.25
5,000 DELETE requests = 5,000 requests x $0.00 (no charge) = $0.00

Data Retrieval:

Amazon S3 data retrieval pricing applies for the S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) and S3 One Zone-IA storage classes and is summarized on the Amazon S3 Pricing page.

Data Retrieval Example:
Assume in one month you retrieve 300GB of S3 Standard-IA, with 100GB going out to the Internet, 100GB going to EC2 in the same AWS region, and 100GB going to CloudFront in the same AWS Region.

Your data retrieval fees for the month would be calculated as 300GB x $0.01/GB = $3.00. Note that you would also pay network data transfer fees for the portion that went out to the Internet.

Please see here for details on billing of objects archived to Amazon Glacier.
* * Your usage for the free tier is calculated each month across all regions except the AWS GovCloud Region and automatically applied to your bill – unused monthly usage will not roll over. Restrictions apply; See offer terms for more details.