AWS Backup and Snapshot Cost Calculator
Price AWS backups and snapshots from your sizes or your bill, and see which retention changes save most.
Before you start: what to have readyShow
- The data you back up, by service, and roughly how much changes a day.
- Your backup plan: how many daily, weekly and monthly points, and any copies.
Each one fills in the fields below for a typical workload of that kind. You can change any of them.
Data size, and how much of it changes in a day. 0 GB leaves a service out.
- A month
- $4,387.67
- Backup data stored
- 70.4 TB
- Biggest line
- Warm storage
US East (N. Virginia) list prices, 42 recovery points kept per resource. AWS Price List, 2026-10-18.
By billing dimension
| Line | A month | A year | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Warm storage | $4,376.00 | $52,512.00 | 100% |
| Restores | $11.67 | $140.00 | 0% |
By service
| Service | Backups are | Data | Stored | Retention factor | A year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EBS volumes and EC2 | Incremental | 5.0 TB | 41.0 TB | 8.2× | $24,600.00 |
| RDS databasesBackup storage up to the database size is free. | Incremental | 1.0 TB | 11.8 TB | 11.8× | $12,312.00 |
| DynamoDB tables | Full copies | 200 GB | 8.4 TB | 42.0× | $10,140.00 |
| S3 buckets | Incremental | 2.0 TB | 9.2 TB | 4.6× | $5,600.00 |
Ways to spend less, ranked
- Move to cold after 90 daysEFS and DynamoDB cold storage is a fifth to a third of warm. EBS archive stores each snapshot in full, so it pays only for long-kept, slow-changing volumes.saves $12,180.00 a year
- Keep 7 daily points, not 30The weeklies and monthlies still cover the older dates.saves $4,560.00 a year
And the carbon
Keeping these backups: about 468 kg COâ‚‚e a year, for 70.4 TB stored.
- Move to cold after 90 daysadds 133 kg a year
- Keep 7 daily points, not 30saves 25 kg a year
Moving to a colder tier changes the price, not the bytes, so it saves no carbon here; EBS archive keeps every snapshot in full, so it adds some. Cloud Carbon Footprint’s storage figure (hard disk, kept three times, with data center overhead), location-based. Methodology.
What this model assumes
Show
- Each kept point stores what changed since the point before it: the daily change times the days between them, never more than the full size. If the same data changes every day, real storage is lower.
- EBS archive keeps each snapshot in full at a quarter of the price, for at least 90 days; RDS backup storage is free up to the database size; Aurora snapshots are full copies, free inside the automated window; DynamoDB backups are full copies.
- Copies are priced at the destination region’s storage rates, plus AWS Backup’s cross-region transfer per GB copied. API requests and job charges are left out: they are small next to storage.
- Prices from the AWS Price List (AWS Backup, RDS and DynamoDB offers, and the EBS feed), read 2026-10-18. Your bill may differ with private pricing.
Grid figures: Google Cloud’s region carbon data (Apache-2.0), and country averages from Ember, Yearly Electricity Data, via Our World in Data, licensed CC BY 4.0.
Want this done on your real bill?
Cloud Cost Audit: We go through your real AWS or Google Cloud bill and hand you a ranked list of what to cut first. From $1,500, fixed. Nothing paid upfront.
Questions
How much does AWS Backup cost?
Mostly storage: in us-east-1, EBS snapshots $0.05 per GB-month, RDS backup beyond the free allowance $0.095, Aurora $0.021, DynamoDB and EFS backups $0.10 and $0.05 warm. What you store depends on how much data changes and how many points you keep, so the same 1 TB can store 3 TB of backups or 30. Copies across regions, restores and DynamoDB point-in-time recovery add to it.
Are AWS backups incremental?
Most are: EBS, RDS, EFS and S3 store only what changed since the previous backup. Three are not. Aurora snapshots are full copies of the cluster, free only while inside the automated backup window. DynamoDB backups are full copies of the table. And an EBS snapshot moved to the archive tier is stored in full.
Does moving backups to cold storage always save money?
No. Cold storage is charged for at least 90 days, so points deleted sooner pay an early-deletion fee. And EBS archive stores every snapshot in full, at a quarter of the price: for a volume that changes little between snapshots, the incremental warm chain is cheaper. The ranked savings show which way it goes for you.
Can it read my actual AWS bill?
Yes. Choose Read my bill, run the query it gives you in Athena against your CUR 2.0 table, and load the result. It shows what you pay for backups by line, service and month, and what to look at first. The file is read in your browser.
How is this different from other backup calculators?
It starts from your data or your bill, not a guess from your company size, and every price comes from the AWS Price List for the region you choose. It shows how each service actually stores its backups, and ranks the changes that save the most.
Related tools
EBS gp2 vs gp3 Calculator
The easiest 20% saving in AWS, unless your volume needs paid IOPS.
OpenS3 Storage Class Calculator
Find the cheapest S3 class once retrieval fees and minimums are counted.
OpenRDS Cost & Rightsizing Calculator
Multi-AZ doubles more than you think. Price it before you turn it on.
OpenMore tools for: Storage and lifecycle, Billing data, allocation and governance
Backups grow quietly. Finitizer shows which ones nobody needs.
Finitizer reads your snapshots and backup plans with read-only access, finds the orphaned snapshots and over-kept points, and tracks the savings as you fix them.
See how Finitizer works