AWS Lambda Pricing 2026
Plans, hidden costs, and alternatives compared
Prices last confirmed on Oct 14, 2026 on aws.amazon.com. Same data as Markdown or JSON.
Cite this data: Toolradar, AWS Lambda pricing verified Oct 2026, toolradar.com/tools/aws-lambda/pricing
AWS Lambda starts at $17/year on the Savings Plans plan.
Verified Oct 2026 from the official pricing page.
Is AWS Lambda worth the price?
Lambda pioneered serverless compute and remains the default choice in the AWS ecosystem.
The per-request pricing model is extraordinarily cost-effective for bursty, low-to-medium traffic workloads, a function handling 5 million requests/month at 256 MB with 200ms average duration costs about $2.10/month. The economics flip at high scale: sustained high-throughput workloads (>100M requests/month) often become cheaper on containers (ECS/Fargate) or even EC2.
Cold starts (100ms-2s depending on runtime) remain the main technical limitation. The pricing is transparent but has multiple dimensions (requests + duration + memory + optional provisioned concurrency) that make cost prediction harder than it looks.
Pricing Plans
Free Tier
Free
- 1M free requests/month
- 400,000 GB-seconds compute
- Never expires
- Included with AWS account
Pay-as-you-go
$0.20 / million
- $0.20 per 1M requests
- $0.0000166667/GB-second (x86)
- Memory from 128 MB to 10 GB
- Billed per millisecond
Graviton2 (ARM)
$0.16 / million
- 34% better price performance
- $0.0000133334/GB-second
- Same functionality as x86
- Recommended for cost savings
Savings Plans
Up to 17% off
- 1 or 3 year commitment
- Compute Savings Plans
- Flexible across regions
- Significant discount
Hidden Costs & Gotchas
Duration billing rounds up to the nearest millisecond, but memory billing is per-GB-second at allocated memory (not used memory). Allocating 1 GB but using 200 MB still bills for 1 GB, right-sizing memory is critical
Provisioned Concurrency
eliminates cold starts but charges $0.0000041667/GB-second even when idle.
Data transfer out
Lambda itself is cheap, but responses that cross AZ boundaries or leave AWS incur standard EC2 data transfer charges ($0.01-0.09/GB). High-traffic APIs serving large payloads can have transfer costs exceed compute costs
VPC-attached Lambda
connecting to RDS or ElastiCache inside a VPC adds ~200-500ms cold start overhead and creates ENI resources.
Ephemeral storage
default 512 MB included, up to 10 GB available at $0.0000000309/GB-second. Processing large files (video, ML models) can add meaningful storage costs
CloudWatch Logs
every Lambda invocation generates logs. At 5M invocations/month generating 1 KB each, log ingestion costs $2.50/month. High-verbosity logging on high-traffic functions can cost more than the compute itself
Which Plan Do You Need?
1 million requests and 400,000 GB-seconds per month, free forever, not just 12 months. Covers most personal projects, webhook handlers, and cron jobs. At 128 MB memory, that is 3.2 million seconds of execution per month.
Pay $0.20 per million requests plus $0.0000166667 per GB-second. No servers to manage, no capacity planning. Scales from zero to thousands of concurrent executions. Best for event-driven architectures, API backends, and data processing pipelines.
34% better price-performance than x86, $0.0000133334 per GB-second. Same Lambda experience, just runs on ARM. Most Node.js, Python, and Java workloads run without modification. The easiest optimization for existing Lambda functions.
Up to 17% discount on compute by committing to a consistent usage level. Stacks with Graviton2 for up to 45% total savings vs x86 on-demand. Only makes sense if you have 6+ months of usage data showing consistent patterns.
How AWS Lambda compares
4 of 5 direct competitors offer a free plan.
| Tool | Starting price | Free plan |
|---|---|---|
| AWS Lambda | $17/year, billing unit not specified | Yes |
| Google Cloud Functions | Contact sales | Yes |
| Azure Functions | $0.20/month, billing unit not specified | No |
| Cloudflare Workers | $5/month, billing unit not specified | Yes |
| Netlify Functions | $19/user/month | Yes |
| Vercel Functions | $20/month, billing unit not specified | Yes |
AWS Lambda Pricing FAQ
How much does AWS Lambda cost?
AWS Lambda starts at $17/year on the Savings Plans plan. A free plan is also available.
Does AWS Lambda have a free plan?
Yes. AWS Lambda offers a free plan called "Free Tier". It includes: 1M free requests/month, 400,000 GB-seconds compute, Never expires.
What are alternatives to AWS Lambda?
Alternatives to AWS Lambda include Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, Cloudflare Workers, Netlify Functions. Azure Functions starts at $0.20/month, billing unit not specified; Cloudflare Workers starts at $5/month, billing unit not specified; Netlify Functions starts at $19/user/month.
AWS Lambda alternatives
Direct competitors. Starting prices match the table above.
Sources
- Official AWS Lambda pricing: aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing (verified Oct 2026)
- Cite this data: Toolradar, AWS Lambda pricing verified Oct 2026, toolradar.com/tools/aws-lambda/pricing
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