Estimate what CloudWatch will cost for your metrics, alarms, dashboards and logs. This CloudWatch cost calculator uses AWS list prices for US East (N. Virginia), applies the free tier, and shows which line item is driving your bill. Part of our free cloud cost calculator.
Enter your metrics, alarms, dashboards and log volume to estimate a monthly CloudWatch bill at US East (N. Virginia) list prices. Log ingestion at $0.50 per GB is usually the biggest line item, so start with that field.
| Line item | Usage | Rate | Monthly cost |
|---|
CloudWatch bills separately for custom metrics, alarms, dashboards, log ingestion, log storage and Logs Insights queries. There is no flat fee. Each part has its own rate and its own small free tier, and the log lines usually dominate.
This CloudWatch cost calculator is the focused version of the CloudWatch tab in our free cloud cost calculator for AWS, Azure and GCP. Use the main tool when you want to compare monitoring cost across clouds, and this page when you only need the AWS bill. All rates below are US East (N. Virginia) list prices, checked against the AWS Price List API on November 11, 2026.
| Item | Price | Free tier |
|---|---|---|
| Custom metrics | $0.30 each for the first 10,000, then $0.10, $0.05 and $0.02 in lower tiers | 10 metrics |
| Standard alarm | $0.10 per alarm metric per month | 10 alarm metrics |
| High-resolution alarm | $0.30 per alarm metric per month | None |
| Composite alarm | $0.50 per month | None |
| Dashboard | $3.00 per month | 3 dashboards |
| Logs ingestion, Standard | $0.50 per GB | 5 GB |
| Logs ingestion, Infrequent Access | $0.25 per GB | None |
| Log storage | $0.03 per GB-month | 5 GB |
| Logs Insights | $0.005 per GB scanned | 5 GB |
Container Insights and Application Signals use different meters (per observation and per GB ingested), so they are not in the calculator above. Check the AWS pricing page for those.
A small app costs a few dollars a month, one Kubernetes cluster with verbose logging costs a few hundred, and a platform team shipping terabytes of logs pays several thousand. The scenarios below use the same formula as the calculator.
| Scenario | Custom metrics | Alarms | Log ingestion | Log storage | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter app | 50 | 5 | 20 GB | 50 GB | $21.33 |
| One EKS cluster | 2,000 | 62 | 300 GB | 600 GB | $779.33 |
| Platform team | 50,000 | 430 | 3,000 GB | 6,000 GB | $8,825.33 |
Assumptions: all logs use the Standard class, storage equals about two months of ingestion, and Logs Insights scans roughly three to ten times the monthly ingestion.
In most accounts the answer is log ingestion. Debug-level logging, chatty health checks and logs shipped from every pod all count at $0.50 per GB. The second cause is custom metrics with high-cardinality dimensions, since every unique combination is billed as its own metric.
IncomingBytes in CloudWatch metrics.For the wider picture, see our guide to reducing AWS costs without breaking production. Network charges are the other line that surprises people, which is why we also built the AWS data transfer cost calculator.
No. The first 10 metrics are free. Metrics 11 to 10,000 cost $0.30 each per month. The "first 10,000" figure is the width of the most expensive pricing tier, not a free allowance, and it is a common source of wrong estimates.
If you are checking another calculator that treats 10,000 metrics as free, the difference is up to $2,997 per month at that volume. Metrics emitted automatically by AWS services, such as EC2 CPU utilization at the default 5-minute interval, do not bill as custom metrics.
Short answers to the questions people ask most about this calculator and the pricing behind it. Every figure is a public list price for the stated region.