CloudTrail Pricing Calculator - Trails, Lake & Insights Costs

CloudTrail provides several free features: 90-day event history of management events viewable in the console, the first copy of management events delivered to S3, and a 30-day Lake trial with 5 GB ingest and 5 GB scan limits. Data events, network activity events, and additional copies of management events are always charged.

Management events (also called control plane operations) capture actions like CreateBucket, StartInstances, and IAM policy changes. They're typically lower volume but important for security auditing. Data events (data plane operations) capture high-volume actions like S3 GetObject and Lambda Invoke. Data events are charged at $0.10 per 100,000 while additional management event copies cost $2.00 per 100,000.

CloudTrail Insights automatically analyzes your management and data events to detect unusual API call patterns, like a spike in failed API calls or changes in provisioning activity. Insights charges $0.35 per 100,000 management events and $0.03 per 100,000 data events analyzed. Use Insights for security monitoring and operational issue detection without building custom analysis tools.

One-year extendable retention charges $0.75/GB for CloudTrail events ingestion with the first year included, and $0.023/GB/month for extended retention (up to 10 years total). Best for monthly usage under 25 TB. Seven-year retention uses tiered ingestion pricing ($2.50/GB for first 5 TB, $1.00/GB for next 20 TB, $0.50/GB above 25 TB) with 7 years of retention included. Better for high-volume workloads exceeding 25 TB/month.

Data event aggregations consolidate your data events into 5-minute summaries showing key trends like access frequency, error rates, and most-used actions. Aggregations are charged at $0.03 per 100,000 events analyzed, in addition to the regular data event charges. Enable aggregations when you need trend analysis without storing every individual event detail.

Delivering events to CloudWatch Logs enables real-time monitoring, alerting, and metric filters. This costs $0.25/GB for CloudTrail delivery plus standard CloudWatch Logs charges. Use CloudWatch delivery when you need immediate alerting on specific API activities. For CloudWatch costs, use our CloudWatch calculator.