AI cost · AWS
Amazon Bedrock cost: what you actually pay
Bedrock itself adds no separate markup line — cost hides in which model you default to (a 140x spread from Nova Micro to Claude Opus), unmetered Provisioned Throughput commitments, and the Knowledge Bases/Guardrails/Agents charges that stack on top of raw tokens.
Public pricing
| Plan | Price | Billing | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| On-Demand | CustomNo commitment; pay per input/output token at the invoked model's published rate. | usage | Access to all on-demand Bedrock foundation models |
| Batch Inference | CustomAsync jobs submitted via S3 input/output for supported models. | usage | Same models as on-demand at roughly half the per-token rate |
| Provisioned Throughput | Custom1-month or 6-month commitment; custom quote from your AWS account team; required for guaranteed throughput or some custom/fine-tuned models. | custom | Dedicated capacity with no shared-tenancy throttling |
Token rates (USD per 1M tokens)
| Model | Input | Output | Cache read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 4.7 (Anthropic)On-demand; matches direct Anthropic API rate. | $5 | $25 | $0.5 |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic)On-demand; batch inference runs ~50% off ($1.50/$7.50). | $3 | $15 | $0.3 |
| Amazon Nova ProAWS's own flagship multimodal model; Nova Micro (text-only) runs as low as $0.035/$0.14 input/output. | $0.8 | $3.2 | — |
Bedrock charges the same per-token rate as calling most providers directly (Claude on Bedrock = Claude direct API price); Amazon's own Nova family is the cheapest in-catalog option. Provisioned Throughput needs a custom AWS quote and bills for the full commitment term regardless of utilization. Bedrock token spend also stacks with the AWS services built around it — Knowledge Bases (OpenSearch/vector store + embedding calls), Guardrails, Agents, and Data Automation all bill separately from the LLM token line.
Approximate — verify before relying on it. Last updated: 2026-07-22. Sourced from Amazon Bedrock Pricing (official) ↗, Anthropic Claude API Pricing (official) ↗.
Where the real Amazon Bedrock cost hides
The sticker is the smallest part of the story. For Amazon Bedrock, these are the line items that quietly inflate the bill:
- Output tokens run 4-6x input tokens across nearly every model family — verbose responses and chain-of-thought-style output quietly dominate the bill.
- The model catalog spans a ~140x price range (Nova Micro ~$0.035/MTok input vs. Claude Opus $5/MTok) — defaulting every task to a flagship model is the single biggest waste driver.
- Knowledge Bases, Guardrails, Agents, and Data Automation bill separately from tokens — a RAG pipeline's real cost is tokens + vector store + embeddings + guardrail checks, not just the model line.
- Provisioned Throughput is billed hourly for the full commitment term whether or not traffic shows up, and its price isn't listed next to on-demand rates, so teams under- or over-commit.
- Cross-region inference profiles and retry logic can silently double-bill tokens if failed requests aren't deduplicated before resubmission.
What an audit finds on Amazon Bedrock
Teams default every call to a large flagship model (Opus/Sonnet) instead of routing simple extraction/classification work to Nova Micro/Lite or Haiku, skip prompt caching, and let verbose prompts run — token bills land 5-10x higher than a right-sized, cached routing setup.
Amazon Bedrock pricing FAQ
Does Bedrock cost more than calling Anthropic or Meta directly?
No — Bedrock's on-demand token price matches the model provider's direct API rate; any premium shows up indirectly via AWS networking, storage, and the surrounding services, not the token rate itself.
When is Provisioned Throughput worth it?
Only at sustained, predictable high volume — it's billed hourly for the full commitment regardless of usage, so bursty or low-volume workloads are cheaper on-demand.
Is prompt caching available on Bedrock?
Yes for supported Claude models — cache reads run about 90% cheaper than base input tokens, while cache writes cost a premium, so it only pays off with genuinely repeated/shared context.
What is Amazon Bedrock really costing you?
Spendassay connects your Amazon Bedrock spend to actual usage and engineering output — a proof-level AI cost report with the wasted dollars named. Neutral across every AI vendor.
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