SQS Pricing Calculator - Standard & FIFO Queue Costs

Standard Queues offer best-effort ordering, at-least-once delivery, and nearly unlimited throughput at $0.40 per million requests. FIFO Queues guarantee exactly-once processing and strict message ordering at $0.50 per million requests (25% more expensive). Choose FIFO when message order matters or duplicates would cause issues.

Every SQS API action counts as one request. SQS charges per 64 KB chunk of payload. A message with 256 KB payload counts as 4 requests. The maximum message size is 256 KB (or up to 2 GB with the SQS Extended Client Library using S3).

Use SendMessageBatch and DeleteMessageBatch to process up to 10 messages per request (max 256 KB total payload). This counts as a single request, potentially reducing costs by up to 90%. For example, sending 10 million 1 KB messages individually costs $4, but batched costs only $0.40.

Fair Queues are Standard queues that use message group IDs. These requests incur an additional $0.10 per millioncharge on top of standard rates. The charge ensures fair processing across message groups. If you don't need message grouping, avoid using message group IDs.

Data transfer within the same AWS region is free. Cross-region data transfer and data transferred to the internet are charged at standard AWS rates ($0.09/GB for the first 10 TB). Most SQS workloads stay within a single region and incur no data transfer charges.

The SQS Free Tier includes 1 million requests per month across all queue types (Standard and FIFO). Unlike many AWS services, this is a permanent free tier that applies to all customers, not just new accounts. Usage is calculated across all regions except GovCloud.