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On Jul 21, 2026 AWS shipped SES Essentials, Pro ($105/region), and Enterprise ($500/region). At 2M emails/mo a Pro-like a-la-carte stack runs ~$1,793 vs Pro plan ~$553 — switch only when you need the bundled stack.
CloudWatch bills across ten distinct dimensions — Logs ingestion at $0.50/GB, Logs storage, custom metrics with cardinality multipliers, alarms tiered by resolution and type, dashboards at $3 each, Synthetics canary runs, RUM events, X-Ray traces, Container Insights, and cross-region replication. Logs ingestion is the largest line on most accounts.
Kevin W.DynamoDB on-demand bills $0.625 per million writes and $0.125 per million reads — pay-per-request convenience with no capacity planning. Provisioned at $0.00065/WCU-hour wins on steady traffic above ~30% utilization. Every GSI doubles the write cost, IA tier cuts storage 60% but adds 25% to request fees, and Global Tables compound the bill per region.
Kevin W.EBS is billed across six dimensions — gp3 storage at $0.08/GB-month, separate IOPS and throughput line items, io2 Block Express, snapshots at $0.05/GB-month, fast snapshot restore at $0.75/DSU-hour. Deleting an EC2 instance never stops the volume bill, and the gp2→gp3 migration is one of the cleanest 20% wins in cloud cost.
Kevin W.ECR storage is $0.10/GB-month — twice S3 Standard. Cross-region replication doubles or triples that. Enhanced scanning bills $0.09 per image scanned, on every push. Pull-through caches for Docker Hub and ECR Public add storage plus data-transfer-in. A 200-service organization with 10 environments and 3 regions can spend more on ECR than on the EKS clusters pulling from it.
Kevin W.EFS Standard is $0.30/GB-month — over 13× S3 Standard. Standard-IA is 92% cheaper at $0.025; Archive is 99% cheaper at $0.0036. Elastic Throughput (the 2024 default) bills $0.03/GB read and $0.06/GB write per transfer. Throughput mode and storage class decisions, made once at provision time, control the bill more than any usage pattern.
Kevin W.EKS control planes are $73/month per cluster. Stay on a Kubernetes version beyond its 14-month standard support and Extended Support bills $0.60/cluster-hour — $438/month per cluster, a 6× multiplier vs standard. EKS Auto Mode adds a ~12% markup over standard EC2 + EBS for managed compute simplicity. The compute side (Karpenter, Spot, Graviton) is where most of the bill lives.
Kevin W.EventBridge looks like a $1/million-events service. It is actually six different billing dimensions — custom events, Pipes at $0.40/M, API Destinations at $0.20/M, Schema Discovery at $0.10/M, Archive at $0.10/GB-month, and cross-region replication that doubles the publish line. Built-in AWS-service events are free; custom buses are where the bill lives.
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