Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee. Estimate your monthly bill using AWS Pricing Calculator. The prices listed are based on the Region in which you establish your Amazon SimpleDB domain(s).
You can get started with Amazon SimpleDB for free. New and existing customers receive 25 SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage for free each month. Many applications should be able to operate perpetually within these free tier limits.
Amazon SimpleDB measures the machine utilization of each request and charges based on the amount of machine capacity used to complete the particular request (SELECT, GET, PUT, etc.), normalized to the hourly capacity of a circa 2007 1.7 GHz Xeon processor. See below for a more detailed description of how machine utilization charges are calculated.
Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon SimpleDB. There is no additional charge for data transferred between Amazon SimpleDB and other Amazon Web Services within the same Region (i.e., $0.00 per GB). Data transferred across Regions (e.g., between Amazon SimpleDB in the EU (Ireland) Region and Amazon EC2 in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region, will be charged at Internet Data Transfer rates on both sides of the transfer.
* Your free usage is calculated each month across all regions and automatically applied to your bill – free usage does not accumulate.
** As part of AWS’s Free Usage Tier, new AWS customers will receive free 15 GB of data transfer out each month aggregated across all AWS services for one year.
*** Data transfer out rate tiers aggregate outbound data transfer across Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Amazon RDS, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Storage Gateway, and Amazon VPC.
Amazon SimpleDB measures the size of your billable data by adding the raw byte size of the data you upload + 45 bytes of overhead for each item, attribute name and attribute-value pair.
Amazon SimpleDB is designed to store relatively small amounts of data and is optimized for fast data access and flexibility in how that data is expressed. In order to minimize your costs across AWS services, large objects or files should be stored in Amazon S3, while the pointers and the meta-data associated with those files can be stored in Amazon SimpleDB. This will allow you to quickly search for and access your files, while minimizing overall storage costs. Click here for a detailed explanation of how storage in Amazon SimpleDB and storage in Amazon S3 differ and a more detailed description on calculating your Storage Costs.
*Any data stored as part of the free tier program must be actively used. If a domain is not accessed for a period of 6 months, it will be subject to removal at the discretion of Amazon Web Services.
(Amazon SimpleDB is licensed by Amazon Web Services, Inc.)