AWS Pricing in India (2026) — Costs, Calculator & How to Save

Q: How does AWS pricing work — what are the pricing models?

AWS uses a pay-as-you-go model with four main purchasing options for compute: (1) On-Demand — pay per second/hour with no commitment; most flexible, most expensive; best for unpredictable or short-term workloads. (2) Savings Plans — commit to a consistent spend ($/hour) for 1 or 3 years for up to 72% savings; ideal for steady baseline usage. (3) Reserved Instances (RIs) — commit to a specific instance type for 1 or 3 years for up to 72% savings; used for databases and capacity-critical workloads. (4) Spot Instances — bid on spare capacity for up to 90% savings; AWS can reclaim them with a 2-minute warning, so they suit fault-tolerant batch/CI jobs. Storage, databases, and data transfer are billed separately by usage. PrecisionTech models the right mix to minimise your bill.

Q: What is the AWS Free Tier and what does it include?

The AWS Free Tier lets you try many services at no cost. It has three forms: (1) 12-months free from sign-up — e.g. 750 hours/month of t2.micro or t3.micro EC2, 750 hours of RDS db.t2.micro, 5 GB of S3 standard storage, 30 GB EBS; (2) Always free — e.g. 1 million AWS Lambda requests/month, 25 GB of DynamoDB, 1 million CloudFront requests; (3) Free trials — short-term trials of specific services. The Free Tier is excellent for learning, prototypes, and very small workloads, but production systems quickly exceed it. Watch out: exceeding free-tier limits silently starts billing — set an AWS Budget alert at ₹0–₹500 to avoid surprises.

Q: Is AWS billed in INR, and how does GST apply?

Yes. Indian customers are billed through Amazon Internet Services Private Limited (AISPL), and you can set your invoice currency to INR. 18% GST applies to AWS services (classified as OIDAR — Online Information and Database Access or Retrieval services). GST-registered businesses can claim input tax credit on AWS invoices against their output GST, effectively recovering that 18% — so the real net cost to a registered business is the pre-GST amount. AWS issues GST-compliant tax invoices with GSTIN and SAC codes. AISPL INR list prices can differ slightly from global USD pricing. PrecisionTech helps configure billing, claim input credit, and structure multi-account billing for clean tax compliance.

Q: Why is my AWS bill higher than expected — what are the hidden costs?

The most common surprises on an AWS bill are: (1) Data transfer (egress) — data leaving AWS to the internet, and even cross-AZ traffic at ₹0.8/GB each way, adds up fast; (2) NAT Gateway — charged per hour plus ₹3.6/GB processed; (3) Idle/forgotten resources — stopped instances still pay for EBS volumes, unattached Elastic IPs, old snapshots, idle load balancers; (4) Over-provisioning — large instances running at low CPU; (5) No commitments — paying 100% on-demand when 60–70% of usage is steady; (6) Dev/staging running 24×7 when it only needs business hours. A cost review usually finds 30–50% waste. See our AWS Cost Optimization service for the full FinOps playbook.

Q: How can I reduce my AWS costs?

The highest-impact levers, in order: (1) Eliminate waste — terminate idle instances, delete unused EBS volumes/snapshots, release Elastic IPs, migrate gp2 volumes to gp3 (20% cheaper). (2) Right-size — use AWS Compute Optimizer to downsize over-provisioned instances. (3) Commit — buy Savings Plans / Reserved Instances for steady workloads (up to 72% off). (4) Use Spot — for fault-tolerant batch/CI work (up to 90% off). (5) Migrate to Graviton — ARM instances are ~20% cheaper with better performance. (6) Tier your storage — S3 lifecycle policies and Intelligent-Tiering. (7) Schedule non-prod — switch off dev/staging outside business hours. Most Indian businesses that have never optimised see a 30–50% reduction within 90 days.

Q: AWS Mumbai vs Hyderabad region — does the region affect price and performance?

AWS has two Indian regions: ap-south-1 (Mumbai), live since 2016 with the widest service coverage, and ap-south-2 (Hyderabad), launched in 2022. Pricing is very close between the two, with minor per-service differences. The bigger decision factors are: (1) Latency — pick the region nearest your users (Mumbai for west/north India, Hyderabad for south/central) to reduce round-trip time; (2) Service availability — Mumbai has more services and newer instance types available first; (3) Data residency — both keep data in India, satisfying RBI and DPDP localisation requirements; (4) Disaster recovery — running across both regions gives in-country DR. PrecisionTech helps choose the right region (or multi-region design) for your latency and compliance needs.

Q: How do I estimate AWS costs before migrating?

Use a structured estimate rather than guessing: (1) Inventory your current servers — CPU, RAM, storage, OS, and peak vs average utilisation; (2) Map each workload to an equivalent AWS instance type (right-sized to actual usage, not current over-provisioned specs); (3) Add storage (EBS + S3), database (RDS/Aurora), data transfer out, load balancers, and backup; (4) Model it in the AWS Pricing Calculator or our cloud cost calculator; (5) Apply Savings Plans/RI discounts for steady workloads to get the realistic committed price, not just on-demand list price. PrecisionTech provides a free Cloud Readiness Assessment with a written AWS cost estimate in INR within 48 hours.

AWS Pricing in India — What It Really Costs & How to Pay Less

A plain-English guide to how AWS billing works in India — EC2, S3, RDS and data-transfer costs in INR on the Mumbai region, the Free Tier, GST and input credit, the four pricing models, and the practical levers that cut a typical bill by 30–50%.

How much does AWS cost in India?

AWS has no fixed price — it is pay-as-you-go, billed per second of compute and per GB of storage with no minimum commitment. As a rough guide on the ap-south-1 (Mumbai) region: a small website or app runs ₹3,000–₹8,000/month, a typical production workload (a few EC2 instances, a database, load balancer and backups) runs ₹40,000–₹1,50,000/month, and enterprise environments run several lakh per month. 18% GST applies but GST-registered businesses can reclaim it as input credit. The only accurate estimate comes from modelling your actual architecture — and a well-optimised account typically costs 30–50% less than an unoptimised one.

How AWS pricing works: the four models

You only pay for what you use, but how you buy compute determines the rate. Choosing the right mix is the single biggest lever on your bill.

On-Demand

Pay per second, no commitment. Most flexible, most expensive. Best for spiky or short-lived workloads.

Savings Plans — up to 72% off

Commit to a steady $/hour for 1 or 3 years. Flexible across instance families. Ideal for predictable baseline usage.

Reserved Instances — up to 72% off

Commit to a specific instance type for 1 or 3 years. Used for databases (RDS) and capacity-critical workloads.

Spot — up to 90% off

Use spare capacity at a deep discount; AWS can reclaim with a 2-minute warning. Great for batch, CI/CD and fault-tolerant jobs.

EC2 (compute) pricing in Mumbai — ap-south-1

Indicative Linux on-demand rates for orientation. Savings Plans/RIs cut these up to 72%; Graviton (ARM) is ~20% cheaper again. Confirm live in the AWS Pricing Calculator.

Instance	vCPU / RAM	On-demand	If always-on / month
t3.micro	2 vCPU · 1 GB	₹0.85/hr	≈ ₹620
t3.medium	2 vCPU · 4 GB	₹3.40/hr	≈ ₹2,500
m6i.large	2 vCPU · 8 GB	₹8.00/hr	≈ ₹5,800
m6i.xlarge	4 vCPU · 16 GB	₹16.00/hr	≈ ₹11,700
c6i.large	2 vCPU · 4 GB	₹7.10/hr	≈ ₹5,200
r6i.large	2 vCPU · 16 GB	₹10.50/hr	≈ ₹7,700

S3 (storage) pricing in Mumbai — per TB/month

Same 1 TB costs ₹2,100 in Standard but only ₹160 in Deep Archive — which is why lifecycle policies matter. Data transfer OUT to the internet is billed separately.

Storage class	Per GB/month	1 TB / month
S3 Standard	₹2.10/GB	≈ ₹2,100
S3 Standard-Infrequent Access	₹1.15/GB	≈ ₹1,150
S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval	₹0.36/GB	≈ ₹360
S3 Glacier Deep Archive	₹0.16/GB	≈ ₹160

GST & INR billing

Billed via AISPL in INR. 18% GST applies (OIDAR services), but GST-registered businesses reclaim it as input tax credit — so your real net cost is the pre-GST amount. AWS issues GST-compliant invoices with GSTIN and SAC codes.

Free Tier

12 months free (750 hrs/month t3.micro, 5 GB S3, RDS micro), plus always-free tiers (1M Lambda requests, 25 GB DynamoDB). Great for prototypes — but set a budget alert so exceeding limits doesn't surprise you.

How to cut your AWS bill 30–50%

Eliminate waste — idle instances, unused EBS volumes/snapshots, unattached Elastic IPs; migrate gp2 → gp3.
Right-size over-provisioned instances using AWS Compute Optimizer.
Commit — Savings Plans / Reserved Instances for steady workloads (up to 72% off).
Use Spot for fault-tolerant batch/CI (up to 90% off) and Graviton for ~20% cheaper compute.
Tier storage with S3 lifecycle policies; schedule dev/staging to business hours only.

Want this done for you? See our AWS Cost Optimization & FinOps service, or compare providers in our AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud guide.

AWS Pricing — Frequently Asked Questions

Straight answers on AWS costs — billing models, GST, EC2/S3 rates, and savings.

1 How much does AWS cost per month in India?

There is no single answer because AWS is pay-as-you-go — you pay only for what you use, billed per second or per GB with no minimum. As a rough orientation for Indian businesses on the ap-south-1 (Mumbai) region: a small website or app (1 × t3.medium EC2, 30 GB storage, modest traffic) typically runs ₹3,000–₹8,000/month; a production workload (2–4 medium/large EC2 instances, an RDS database, load balancer, backups) typically runs ₹40,000–₹1,50,000/month; and a mid-size enterprise environment runs several lakh rupees per month. Your actual cost depends on compute hours, storage, data transfer out, and managed services used. The only accurate way to estimate is to model your specific architecture in the cloud cost calculator or the official AWS Pricing Calculator.

2 How does AWS pricing work — what are the pricing models?

AWS uses a pay-as-you-go model with four main purchasing options for compute: (1) On-Demand — pay per second/hour with no commitment; most flexible, most expensive; best for unpredictable or short-term workloads. (2) Savings Plans — commit to a consistent spend ($/hour) for 1 or 3 years for up to 72% savings; ideal for steady baseline usage. (3) Reserved Instances (RIs) — commit to a specific instance type for 1 or 3 years for up to 72% savings; used for databases and capacity-critical workloads. (4) Spot Instances — bid on spare capacity for up to 90% savings; AWS can reclaim them with a 2-minute warning, so they suit fault-tolerant batch/CI jobs. Storage, databases, and data transfer are billed separately by usage. PrecisionTech models the right mix to minimise your bill.

3 What is the AWS Free Tier and what does it include?

The AWS Free Tier lets you try many services at no cost. It has three forms: (1) 12-months free from sign-up — e.g. 750 hours/month of t2.micro or t3.micro EC2, 750 hours of RDS db.t2.micro, 5 GB of S3 standard storage, 30 GB EBS; (2) Always free — e.g. 1 million AWS Lambda requests/month, 25 GB of DynamoDB, 1 million CloudFront requests; (3) Free trials — short-term trials of specific services. The Free Tier is excellent for learning, prototypes, and very small workloads, but production systems quickly exceed it. Watch out: exceeding free-tier limits silently starts billing — set an AWS Budget alert at ₹0–₹500 to avoid surprises.

4 How much does an EC2 instance cost in the Mumbai (ap-south-1) region?

EC2 on-demand pricing in ap-south-1 (Mumbai) is billed per second (60-second minimum) and varies by instance family. Indicative Linux on-demand rates for orientation: t3.micro (2 vCPU, 1 GB) ≈ ₹0.85/hour (~₹620/month if always on); t3.medium (2 vCPU, 4 GB) ≈ ₹3.4/hour (~₹2,500/month); m6i.large (2 vCPU, 8 GB) ≈ ₹8/hour (~₹5,800/month); m6i.xlarge (4 vCPU, 16 GB) ≈ ₹16/hour (~₹11,700/month). Windows instances cost more due to licensing. These are on-demand list rates — Savings Plans or Reserved Instances cut them by up to 72%, and Graviton (ARM) instances are ~20% cheaper again. Always confirm current rates in the AWS Pricing Calculator.

5 How much does S3 storage cost in India?

Amazon S3 in ap-south-1 (Mumbai) is billed per GB-month plus request and data-transfer charges. Indicative storage rates: S3 Standard ≈ ₹2.1/GB/month; S3 Standard-Infrequent Access ≈ ₹1.15/GB/month; S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval ≈ ₹0.36/GB/month; S3 Glacier Deep Archive ≈ ₹0.16/GB/month. So 1 TB in S3 Standard ≈ ₹2,100/month, while the same 1 TB in Deep Archive ≈ ₹160/month — a 92% difference. This is why lifecycle policies (moving old data to cheaper tiers) and S3 Intelligent-Tiering matter so much. Note that data transferred OUT of S3 to the internet is charged separately (the first 100 GB/month is free, then roughly ₹8–₹9/GB).

6 Is AWS billed in INR, and how does GST apply?

Yes. Indian customers are billed through Amazon Internet Services Private Limited (AISPL), and you can set your invoice currency to INR. 18% GST applies to AWS services (classified as OIDAR — Online Information and Database Access or Retrieval services). GST-registered businesses can claim input tax credit on AWS invoices against their output GST, effectively recovering that 18% — so the real net cost to a registered business is the pre-GST amount. AWS issues GST-compliant tax invoices with GSTIN and SAC codes. AISPL INR list prices can differ slightly from global USD pricing. PrecisionTech helps configure billing, claim input credit, and structure multi-account billing for clean tax compliance.

7 Why is my AWS bill higher than expected — what are the hidden costs?

The most common surprises on an AWS bill are: (1) Data transfer (egress) — data leaving AWS to the internet, and even cross-AZ traffic at ₹0.8/GB each way, adds up fast; (2) NAT Gateway — charged per hour plus ₹3.6/GB processed; (3) Idle/forgotten resources — stopped instances still pay for EBS volumes, unattached Elastic IPs, old snapshots, idle load balancers; (4) Over-provisioning — large instances running at low CPU; (5) No commitments — paying 100% on-demand when 60–70% of usage is steady; (6) Dev/staging running 24×7 when it only needs business hours. A cost review usually finds 30–50% waste. See our AWS Cost Optimization service for the full FinOps playbook.

8 How can I reduce my AWS costs?

The highest-impact levers, in order: (1) Eliminate waste — terminate idle instances, delete unused EBS volumes/snapshots, release Elastic IPs, migrate gp2 volumes to gp3 (20% cheaper). (2) Right-size — use AWS Compute Optimizer to downsize over-provisioned instances. (3) Commit — buy Savings Plans / Reserved Instances for steady workloads (up to 72% off). (4) Use Spot — for fault-tolerant batch/CI work (up to 90% off). (5) Migrate to Graviton — ARM instances are ~20% cheaper with better performance. (6) Tier your storage — S3 lifecycle policies and Intelligent-Tiering. (7) Schedule non-prod — switch off dev/staging outside business hours. Most Indian businesses that have never optimised see a 30–50% reduction within 90 days.

9 AWS Mumbai vs Hyderabad region — does the region affect price and performance?

AWS has two Indian regions: ap-south-1 (Mumbai), live since 2016 with the widest service coverage, and ap-south-2 (Hyderabad), launched in 2022. Pricing is very close between the two, with minor per-service differences. The bigger decision factors are: (1) Latency — pick the region nearest your users (Mumbai for west/north India, Hyderabad for south/central) to reduce round-trip time; (2) Service availability — Mumbai has more services and newer instance types available first; (3) Data residency — both keep data in India, satisfying RBI and DPDP localisation requirements; (4) Disaster recovery — running across both regions gives in-country DR. PrecisionTech helps choose the right region (or multi-region design) for your latency and compliance needs.

10 How do I estimate AWS costs before migrating?

Use a structured estimate rather than guessing: (1) Inventory your current servers — CPU, RAM, storage, OS, and peak vs average utilisation; (2) Map each workload to an equivalent AWS instance type (right-sized to actual usage, not current over-provisioned specs); (3) Add storage (EBS + S3), database (RDS/Aurora), data transfer out, load balancers, and backup; (4) Model it in the AWS Pricing Calculator or our cloud cost calculator; (5) Apply Savings Plans/RI discounts for steady workloads to get the realistic committed price, not just on-demand list price. PrecisionTech provides a free Cloud Readiness Assessment with a written AWS cost estimate in INR within 48 hours.

11 Is AWS cheaper than Azure or Google Cloud in India?

For comparable compute and storage, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are broadly within ~10–15% of each other on list price in India — the headline "which is cheapest" depends entirely on the exact services, instance types, and commitment levels you use. What moves your real bill far more than the provider choice is how well the environment is optimised: right-sizing, commitment coverage (Savings Plans/RIs), storage tiering, and waste elimination routinely change a bill by 30–50% — much more than cross-provider list-price gaps. AWS does have the most mature cost-management tooling (Cost Explorer, CUR, Compute Optimizer) and the longest-running India region. For a full breakdown see our AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud comparison.

12 Does PrecisionTech charge for an AWS cost estimate or assessment?

No. PrecisionTech provides a free Cloud Readiness Assessment and AWS cost estimate for Indian businesses. We review your current infrastructure or AWS account (read-only), map it to a right-sized AWS architecture, factor in Savings Plans/RI discounts and GST, and deliver a written estimate in INR — typically within 48 hours. As an Authorized AWS Partner (APN) with 30+ years in Indian IT, we also help you claim GST input credit and set up budget guardrails so there are no billing surprises. Contact us to get started at no cost.

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