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Amazon CloudWatch pricing calculator
CloudWatch charges $0.50 per GB of logs it takes in, $0.03 per GB-month to keep them, $0.005 per GB your queries scan, and $0.30 for each custom metric. Put in your own volumes and see which line your bill really comes from. It is often the metrics, not the logs.
Estimated monthly CloudWatch bill
$0
Prices for US East (N. Virginia) from aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/pricing and the AWS Price List (published 2026-10-07), checked 2026-10-30. Logs: Standard $0.50 per GB, Infrequent Access $0.25 per GB; Lambda and other vended logs $0.50 per GB for the first 10 TB, then $0.25, $0.10 and $0.05; storage $0.03 per GB-month on the compressed size (AWS's own example assumes 30 GB compresses to 6 GB, which is where the 20% default comes from); Logs Insights $0.005 per GB scanned; Live Tail $0.01 a minute. Metrics $0.30 each for the first 10,000, $0.10 for the next 240,000, $0.05 for the next 750,000, $0.02 above 1 million. Alarms $0.10 standard, $0.30 high resolution. API requests and GetMetricData $0.01 per 1,000. Free tier: 5 GB of log data across ingestion, storage and scans (applied here to ingestion first), 10 metrics, 10 standard alarms, 1 million API requests (GetMetricData is never free), 1,800 Live Tail minutes. Not included: dashboards beyond the 3 free ones, composite and anomaly detection alarms, logs delivered to S3 or Firehose, Container Insights, Application Signals, Synthetics, RUM, data protection scanning, and data transfer.
Why the bill grows
Custom metrics multiply without anyone writing new code. A metric with a dimension for each customer, each endpoint or each container is a new metric for every value that dimension takes. Six metrics with a customer id across 400 customers is 2,400 metrics, about $717 a month after the free 10, and it rises with every signup. If the metrics line here is bigger than the logs line, look for that dimension first.
Log ingestion is the next suspect, and it usually comes from a few chatty sources: request and response bodies, health checks every few seconds, a debug level someone switched on in production and forgot. Halving what you send halves the line. Retention matters less than people expect, because storage is billed after compression at $0.03 per GB, but log groups never expire by default, so that line only ever grows.
Logs Insights is cheap per query and expensive in dashboards. A dashboard widget re-runs its query over the whole time range each time it loads, so a busy on-call screen with three widgets over the last day can scan more data in a month than you ingest in a year.
We wrote out a full example, a $1,067 bill brought down to about $100, in CloudWatch pricing: logs cost $0.50 a GB, metrics cost more. If CloudWatch is one line on a bigger AWS bill, our free cloud cost audit reads the whole bill, and we cut startup AWS bills for $0 up front, paid from half the verified saving for 6 months.