EC2 Pricing Models

Amazon EC2 is free to try. There are four ways to pay for Amazon EC2 instances: On-Demand, Reserved Instances, and Spot Instances. You can also pay for Dedicated Hosts which provide you with EC2 instance capacity on physical servers dedicated for your use.

• On-Demand – With On-Demand instances, you pay for compute capacity by per hour or per second depending on which instances you run. No longer-term commitments or upfront payments are needed.
• Spot Instances – Amazon EC2 Spot instances allow you to bid on spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity for up to 90% off the On-Demand price. Spot instances are recommended for applications that have flexible start and end times, applications that are only feasible at very low compute prices or users with urgent computing needs for large amounts of additional capacity.
• Reserved Instances – Reserved Instances provide you with a significant discount (up to 75%) compared to On-Demand instance pricing. For applications that have steady state or predictable usage, require reserved capacity or can commit to using EC2 for a 1 or 3 year period, Reserved Instances can provide significant savings compared to using On-Demand instances.
• Per-Second Billing – With per-second billing, you pay for only what you use. It takes cost of unused minutes and seconds in an hour off of the bill, so you can focus on improving your applications instead of maximising usage to the hour.