Short answer: most teams should start with on-demand pricing, move offline workloads to batch inference, and consider provisioned throughput only for steady, high-volume traffic with a predictable model.
The pricing options
| Option | How you pay | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| On-demand | Per input and output token, no commitment | Prototypes, variable traffic, most production apps at first |
| Batch inference | Per token, at a discount versus on-demand for supported models | Offline jobs: classification, summarization, evaluations |
| Provisioned throughput | Per model unit per hour, with or without a term commitment | Steady high volume, custom models |
| Prompt caching | Cached input tokens billed at a lower rate on supported models | Long, repeated system prompts and documents |
What actually drives the bill
- Output tokens usually cost several times more than input tokens. Long answers are expensive answers.
- Context size. Sending a whole document on every call multiplies input tokens; RAG and caching reduce it.
- Model choice. Smaller models can be an order of magnitude cheaper for routing, extraction and classification.
- Retries and agents. Agent loops call the model many times per user request.
Estimate before you build
estimate.py
monthly_cost = requests_per_month * (
avg_input_tokens / 1_000_000 * input_price_per_million +
avg_output_tokens / 1_000_000 * output_price_per_million
)Take the prices from the Bedrock pricing page for your model and region. They change often, which is why this site keeps a dated tracker instead of hard-coding them in articles.
Set maxTokens on every call. Without it, a model can return far more output than you need, and output is the expensive side.
Track it per application
Application inference profiles let you tag model usage per application or team, so Cost Explorer can split the Bedrock bill instead of showing one line.
Coming in this hub: a token cost calculator and a monthly benchmark of cost per task across Bedrock models.
Run the numbers for your account
Use the Bedrock token cost calculator with your own traffic and prices.