AWS Amplify Pricing 2026: What You’ll Actually Pay
AWS Amplify pricing is pure usage — build minutes, bandwidth, SSR, a $15 firewall and separate AWS backend services, with no flat plan. See real monthly costs for four app profiles and a flat alternative.
That is the short answer. The longer answer — and the reason Amplify bills catch people out — is that there is no single price to point at. Amplify is a usage meter with at least six separate dials for hosting alone, and then the backend (auth, APIs, database, functions) is billed by whole other AWS services on top. There is no per-seat fee, which is genuinely nice, but a "free" or "cheap" app can turn into a three-figure invoice once real traffic, server-side rendering, and a firewall are in play. Below we break down every charge from Amplify’s own pricing page, compute the real monthly cost for four app profiles, walk through two worked examples with the math, and cover the flat-price alternative if a predictable all-in bill matters more than a managed AWS platform.
How does AWS Amplify pricing work in 2026?
The layers, straight from Amplify’s own pricing page (aws.amazon.com/amplify/pricing):
- Build & deploy — Standard instance (8 GB / 4 vCPUs) $0.01/build minute, free up to 1,000 minutes a month; Large (16 GB) $0.025; XLarge (72 GB) $0.10.
- Hosting storage — $0.023/GB a month on the CDN, free up to 5 GB (this recurs until the app is deleted).
- Data transfer out — $0.15/GB served, free up to 15 GB a month.
- SSR request count — $0.30 per 1 million requests, free up to 500,000 a month.
- SSR request duration — $0.20 per GB-hour, free up to 100 GB-hours a month.
- Web Application Firewall — $15/month per app, plus the underlying AWS WAF rule and request charges.
The key difference from a flat host: there is no plan price and no per-seat fee — teams are always free — but there are six separate hosting meters, and a whole second layer of AWS services for the backend.
What will you actually pay? Cost by app profile
We estimated these from Amplify’s published rates ($0.01/build minute, $0.15/GB served, $0.023/GB stored, $0.30/million SSR requests, $0.20/GB-hour, $15/month WAF). The two middle rows match AWS’s own published worked examples.
| App profile | What it runs | Est. Amplify / month | shiply.now (flat) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Static site / demo | Low traffic, inside free tier | ~$0–$3 | $0 |
| Startup app (5 devs, 300 users) | 600 build mins + light hosting | ~$8 | $8 |
| Busy SSR app (10,000 users) | ~440 GB served, hosting only | ~$66 | $8–$24 |
| Full-stack app + firewall | SSR + WAF + Cognito/AppSync/Lambda | ~$100–$150+ | $24 |
Worked example: a startup app (AWS’s own math)
Amplify publishes this one itself — a 5-developer team with a 300-daily-user app, committing twice a day:
- Build minutes — 5 devs × 2 commits × 20 days × 3 min = 600 minutes, all inside the free 1,000 = $0 over free, else 600 × $0.01 = $6
- Data served — ~13.2 GB × $0.15 = $1.97
- Storage — ~4.9 GB × $0.023 = $0.11
AWS totals this at $8.08 a month for hosting — and that is before a single backend service. Add auth, a database or a firewall and it climbs.
Worked example: a full-stack SSR app
Now a growing Next.js app — heavier builds, real traffic, server-side rendering, a firewall and an AWS backend. Computed from the published rates:
- Build — 2,400 build mins − 1,000 free = 1,400 × $0.01 = $14
- Data served — 220 GB − 15 free = 205 × $0.15 = $30.70
- SSR requests — 1.5M − 0.5M free = 1M × $0.30/M = $0.30
- SSR duration — 150 GB-hours − 100 free = 50 × $0.20 = $10
- WAF — $15 per app + rule costs
- Backend — Cognito + AppSync + DynamoDB + Lambda beyond free tiers ≈ $30
That is roughly $100 a month for one app — and every dial moves independently with traffic. The same app on shiply.now is a flat $24, backend included.
The hidden costs that inflate an AWS Amplify bill
In order of how often they catch people out:
- SSR duration — server-rendered apps bill $0.20 per GB-hour and $0.30 per million requests, on top of bandwidth; a busy Next.js app racks these up fast.
- The $15 firewall — adding WAF is a flat $15 a month per app before any rule or request costs, so multi-app setups multiply it.
- Data transfer out — $0.15/GB served past the free 15 GB; an app serving images or video under real traffic adds up quickly.
- Separate backend services — auth (Cognito), APIs (AppSync), data (DynamoDB), functions (Lambda) and storage (S3) are each billed on their own meters, not bundled into the Amplify price.
- Storage that recurs — the $0.023/GB CDN storage charge repeats every month until you delete the app, even for old builds.
None of these are hidden in AWS’s docs. They are just easy to leave out when you quote yourself the "$8 a month" or "free tier" headline.
AWS Amplify vs Railway vs Render: which pricing model fits?
The practical read: Amplify suits teams already deep in AWS who want front-end hosting wired to Cognito, AppSync and Lambda and do not mind assembling the bill; Railway suits spiky, variable workloads where idle time should be near-free; Render suits steady always-on services that want a predictable per-instance price. What none of them offer is one flat number covering compute, database, bandwidth and a firewall — which is the gap shiply.now fills. We go deeper in the Railway pricing breakdown and the Render pricing breakdown.
How to estimate your AWS Amplify bill before you deploy
A quick sanity-check: estimate your monthly daily-active users, multiply by average page size and 30 days for bandwidth, count whether you render server-side, and decide if you need the firewall. If you are on AWS backend services too, budget those separately — Cognito, DynamoDB and Lambda each have their own free tiers and rates. If the total makes you wince, a flat plan is worth a look before you wire it all in.
When AWS Amplify’s pricing is the right call
None of this makes Amplify a bad product — it is a capable, deeply-integrated AWS platform, and the no-seat model is genuinely generous for teams. It makes it a usage-metered, multi-service one, where the headline "pay for what you use" hides how many separate things you end up using. Knowing your traffic, whether you render server-side, and which AWS services you will lean on is the whole decision.
Three ways to cut an AWS Amplify bill
- Trim build minutes. Every minute over 1,000 is $0.01, and busy teams blow past it. Cache dependencies, skip redundant builds, and avoid the Large and XLarge instances unless you need them.
- Watch bandwidth. $0.15/GB served past 15 GB adds up on image- or video-heavy apps. Aggressive caching, compression and right-sized assets take a real bite out of it.
- Render static where you can. SSR bills both per request and per GB-hour. Pre-rendering or static-generating pages that do not need server rendering removes two whole meters.
These help, but they are all ongoing maintenance — you are managing six meters, a firewall fee and a handful of backend services. The alternative is to have one number instead.
Is AWS Amplify worth it? A quick verdict
Put simply: Amplify gives you deep AWS integration and no per-seat fee, but bills you across six hosting meters plus whole other services on top. That is the right trade for AWS-native teams and the wrong one for anyone who wants a predictable number. If you find yourself trimming builds, watching bandwidth, and pruning SSR to keep the bill down, that effort is the real price — and it is the effort a flat plan removes.
The flat-price alternative: shiply.now
It is also built for agents: your AI tool publishes in one HTTP call, with no account needed to start and no build step to wait on. If you are weighing metered and multi-service hosts more broadly, the same logic runs through the flat vs metered pricing guide and our flat pricing.
How to move from AWS Amplify to shiply in four steps
- Export your app from Amplify — the built output, plus any database schema and seed data from DynamoDB or your backend.
- Create a free account on shiply.now and pick a flat tier.
- Publish in one call from your agent or the CLI — you get a live URL, a SQL database, server functions and a custom domain.
- Point your domain at the new site and retire the Amplify app and its AWS services. The bill is now flat.