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Amazon EBS pricing calculator
Price EBS volumes the way AWS bills them: gigabytes provisioned (not used), plus provisioned IOPS and throughput where the volume type charges for them, plus snapshots. If you price gp2, the calculator also shows the same volumes on gp3 with the same performance, because that switch is the cheapest fix on most AWS bills we read.
Estimated monthly EBS bill
$0
On-Demand prices from aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing and the AWS Price List (published 2026-10-29), checked 2026-10-31. A full month is 730 hours; AWS bills volumes per second for the time they exist. gp3 includes 3,000 IOPS and 125 MiB/s per volume. io2 IOPS are priced in three tiers (up to 32,000, then to 64,000, then above). gp2 performance is set by size: 3 IOPS per GiB (minimum 100, maximum 16,000) and up to 250 MiB/s. Not included: Fast Snapshot Restore ($0.75 per hour per snapshot per Availability Zone in US East), EBS direct API requests, snapshot copies across Regions, and the EC2 instance itself.
Why the bill grows
EBS charges for the size you asked for, not the data on the disk. A 1,000 GiB volume with 90 GB written costs the same as a full one. Volumes are also billed while the instance is stopped and after it is gone: a volume in the "available" state, attached to nothing, keeps billing until someone deletes it.
gp2 is still the default in a lot of places outside the console, older Terraform modules and launch templates among them. It costs 20% more per GiB than gp3, and the only way to get more IOPS on gp2 is to make the volume bigger. That is how people end up with a 1,000 GiB volume holding 40 GB of database. On gp3 you would buy 100 GiB and add the IOPS you need for $0.005 each.
Provisioned IOPS volumes are where the large lines live. On io1 and io2 every provisioned IOPS costs $0.065 a month in US East whether the disk uses it or not, so 10,000 IOPS is $650 a month before storage. Check the volume's real peak in CloudWatch (VolumeReadOps plus VolumeWriteOps per second) before keeping it; many of these were set once for a load test.
Snapshots are incremental in the standard tier, so the GB stored is usually far smaller than the volume size. Archiving one turns it into a full snapshot first, at $0.0125 per GB-month, and you pay at least 90 days of it. Archive a monthly or yearly snapshot you must keep, not the daily ones.
The full story, with a worked bill, is in EBS pricing: gp3 is $0.08 a GB, gp2 still costs $0.10. If your EBS lines look bigger than this page says they should, our free cloud cost audit ($0) reads the bill, and we cut AWS bills for $0 up front, paid only from the saving.