AWS Lightsail pricing in 2026: what it really costs

TL;DR: AWS Lightsail instances start at $5 a month for 512 MB of RAM with a public IPv4 address, managed databases at $15, and a small app with Postgres costs about $25 to $28 a month. The bill grows with CPU, because small bundles sustain as little as 5% of each vCPU, and with traffic, at $0.09 per GB past the 1 to 10 TB allowance.

• Pick Lightsail if you want to stay on AWS with a fixed monthly price, and your app fits on one or two servers.
• Pick a Lightsail managed database if you want point-in-time restore and someone else patching Postgres or MySQL, from $15 a month.
• Pick EC2 or Fargate if you need autoscaling or containers wired into the rest of AWS; AWS Fargate pricing has that math.
• Pick a cheaper server if the bill is the point: Hetzner or Netcup in Europe sell 4 GB of RAM for $7 to $9.25, against $24 on Lightsail.
• Get push-to-deploy on a Lightsail instance or any other server with Ployz, which I build: push to GitHub, preview environments, zero-downtime deploys, free on your own servers.

Amazon Lightsail is AWS's fixed-price virtual server. Each plan, which AWS calls a bundle, includes vCPUs, RAM, an SSD, a public IPv4 address and a monthly transfer allowance for one price. Lightsail also sells managed databases, containers, load balancers, block storage, object storage and a CDN, each at a fixed price.

How much does a Lightsail instance cost?

Linux bundles run from $5 a month for 512 MB of RAM to $1,764 for 256 GB, with a public IPv4 address and a transfer allowance included. An app that needs 2 GB of RAM fits the $12 bundle; with Postgres on the same instance, take the $24 one.

General purpose Linux bundles in US East, from the Lightsail pricing page, the bundle docs and the baseline CPU docs:

Past the allowance, outbound traffic costs $0.09 per GB. Lightsail bills by the hour up to the monthly price, so the $5 bundle is $0.0067 an hour (billing FAQ). Instances created on or before 29 June 2023 keep the older bundles, which have 1 vCPU at the small sizes.

What would your app cost on AWS Lightsail?

Pick the app closest to yours, or open the sliders. The first row puts the app on the smallest Linux bundle with enough RAM and adds a Lightsail managed database. The second puts the app and the database on one bigger bundle. The server rows size one box the same way, and Ployz is free on all of them.

What does a small, medium and large app cost on Lightsail?

A small app costs about $28 a month on Lightsail with a managed database, and $25 with the database on the instance. At the large size the gap is $182.50 against $89.50, because a high-availability database costs twice the standard one and Ployz needs no load balancer.

The three apps I priced:

• Small: 2 GB of app RAM, a 10 GB database, 500 GB of outbound traffic.
• Medium: 4 GB of app RAM, a 50 GB database, 2 TB of traffic.
• Large: 8 GB of app RAM, a 100 GB database, 5 TB of traffic, a load balancer and a high-availability database.

All of them use Linux bundles with a public IPv4 in US East (N. Virginia), with daily automatic snapshots on. The "database on it" rows size the instance to the app's RAM plus the RAM of the managed plan it replaces, which is conservative. Ployz adds nothing to the bill: it's free on your own servers, custom domains included.

None of the three goes past its transfer allowance, so there's no overage line. The small app would at 5 TB, and that adds $90 to $180 a month (see bandwidth).

The managed database is the line that grows: at the large size it's $120, more than the 16 GB instance that could hold the whole app.

The server rows don't include what the managed database does for you: point-in-time restore, a standby in a second Availability Zone on the high-availability plan, and someone else patching it. The Netcup and Hetzner rows also have no backups. None of the Ployz rows has the $18 load balancer, because Ployz serves HTTPS from each server. Hetzner's CX servers are in Germany and Finland only; in the US, Netcup's Manassas datacenter is the cheap option.

How much CPU does a Lightsail instance really give you?

Less than the vCPU count suggests. General purpose bundles up to $164 are burstable: each vCPU has a baseline, and the $24 bundle's baseline is 20% per vCPU, which is 0.4 of a vCPU sustained.

The sustained column in the bundle table is vCPUs times the baseline. Bundles from $384 up have no burst limit.

While the instance runs under its baseline, it builds up burst capacity. Above the baseline it spends that capacity, and once it's gone the instance falls back to the baseline. The docs list no extra charge for this, unlike EC2's T instances, whose Unlimited mode bills surplus CPU at $0.04 to $0.05 per vCPU-hour (EC2 pricing). On Lightsail, running out costs speed, not money.

This matters more than the price table. A web app that idles most of the day fits the baseline. A busy background worker, a build, or a database under steady load will drain the burst on the small bundles, and the app slows down with no warning on the bill. If your app keeps a core busy, size up to the $84 bundle or look at the compute optimized bundles.

The other bundle types cost more for the same RAM:

Is AWS Lightsail free?

Not on its own any more. The billing FAQ says Lightsail's short-term free trials "have been replaced by the AWS Free Tier" and are "no longer available to new Lightsail customers". Trials that already started run until they end.

The AWS Free Tier now gives new accounts up to $200 in credits: $100 at sign-up and up to $100 more for trying AWS services (Free Tier FAQs). The credits work on Lightsail. The free plan ends after 6 months or when the credits run out, whichever comes first. If you don't upgrade to a paid plan by then, AWS suspends the account and keeps your data for 90 days before it's erased.

If you earn the full $200, it covers six months of a $24 bundle with $56 to spare. After that you pay the prices above.

The same billing FAQ still says new customers get one month of the $15 database plan free. That contradicts the line about trials ending, so I wouldn't count on it.

What does a Lightsail managed database cost?

A managed MySQL or PostgreSQL database starts at $15 a month for 1 GB of RAM and 40 GB of SSD. The high-availability plan costs twice as much, because it adds a standby instance and disk in a second Availability Zone.

From the Lightsail pricing page:

• Storage comes with the plan. A 50 GB database needs the 80 GB plan, so storage, not RAM, often picks the price.
• Encryption: the pricing page lists the 1 GB plan without encryption; the 2 GB plan and up are encrypted.
• Backups: point-in-time restore is on by default. Automatic snapshots don't work on managed databases, so other backups are manual snapshots (snapshot docs).
• Transfer: only outbound traffic counts against the database's allowance, and traffic to your instances over private IPs is free.

Compare that with putting the database on the instance. The 1 GB database plan costs $15, and moving from the 2 GB to the 4 GB bundle to hold it costs $12. At 4 GB the database plan is $60, while the step from an 8 GB to a 16 GB bundle is $40. You give up point-in-time restore and patching to save that.

What do Lightsail containers cost?

Lightsail container services cost $7 to $160 a month per node, and each service includes 500 GB of transfer.

From the Lightsail pricing page:

Look at the RAM per dollar. $40 buys one Medium node with 2 GB. $44 buys an 8 GB instance with 5 TB of transfer instead of 500 GB. Containers save you from running a server. From the Medium size up, you pay three to four times as much per GB of RAM for that.

What do Lightsail's other services cost?

Most add-ons are small. The one that adds up is the $18 load balancer.

From the pricing page and the billing FAQ:

For a small app, the only ones you're likely to need are object storage for uploads and database dumps, and maybe a load balancer once you run two instances.

What changes the bill?

Four things: transfer, snapshots, stopped instances and how long things run.

Bandwidth

Every bundle includes 1 to 10 TB of transfer, and Lightsail charges $0.09 per GB past it in the US and most of Europe. Inbound traffic is never charged, but it does count toward the allowance.

From the data transfer FAQ:

• Pooling: the allowance adds up across instances of the same bundle in the same region, and across IPv4 and IPv6 bundles of the same size. A $5 and a $7 instance don't share.
• No resets: deleting an instance and creating a new one doesn't reset the month's usage.
• Half allowance in Mumbai, Sydney, Jakarta, Malaysia, Hong Kong and São Paulo.
• Overage by region: $0.09 per GB in US East, US West (Oregon), Canada, Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris, Stockholm and Hong Kong. Malaysia is $0.108, Singapore and Spain $0.12, Seoul and Mumbai $0.13, Jakarta $0.132, Tokyo $0.14, São Paulo $0.15 and Sydney $0.17.
• Free traffic: transfer between Lightsail instances and databases over private IPs is free, even past the allowance.
• Load balancers: traffic between the load balancer and the internet doesn't count toward your instances' allowance. Traffic between the load balancer and your instances does.

For the small app, by monthly outbound traffic:

I treat a GB and a GiB as the same here; the difference is under 7%. The Lightsail columns assume inbound traffic is small, because it eats into the same allowance. Netcup's plan page says "traffic included" without a metered overage price.

Snapshots

Snapshots cost $0.05 per GB a month and are incremental, so after the first one you pay for what changed. A 28 GB snapshot is $1.40 a month.

From the automatic snapshot docs:

• Lightsail keeps the latest seven daily automatic snapshots.
• Deleting an instance deletes its automatic snapshots. Copy one to a manual snapshot to keep it.
• Windows instances and managed databases can't use automatic snapshots.

A snapshot is a disk image, so it catches your database files. A disk image of a running database isn't the same as a clean dump, though. If you run Postgres on the instance, also run pg_dump on a schedule and copy the file somewhere else, like object storage in another region.

Stopped instances

A stopped instance still costs money. The billing FAQ says instances and managed databases incur charges until they're deleted, "even when they are in the stopped state". To stop paying, take a snapshot and delete the instance.

Watch the static IP when you do. It's free while attached and $0.005 an hour once it sits unattached for over an hour, which is about $3.60 a month.

Hourly billing

Lightsail bills by the hour, capped at the monthly price. So a test instance that runs for a day costs a day's worth, and an app that runs all month pays the monthly price either way.

Is Lightsail cheaper than EC2?

For a small app, yes. A Lightsail bundle includes its public IPv4 address and terabytes of transfer. On EC2, a public IPv4 address costs $0.005 an hour, about $3.60 a month (VPC pricing), and outbound traffic past the first 100 GB a month is metered (EC2 pricing).

I priced the same small app on Lightsail, EC2 and Fargate in AWS Fargate pricing. With a load balancer it came to $62 on Lightsail and $121 on EC2. EC2 makes sense when you need autoscaling, instance types Lightsail doesn't sell, or CPU without a burst baseline at a smaller size.

Is Lightsail cheaper than a regular VPS?

Against DigitalOcean, it's even. A 4 GB Lightsail bundle and a 4 GiB Droplet are both $24 a month with 4 TB of transfer. The difference is overage: $0.09 per GB on Lightsail against $0.01 per GiB on DigitalOcean. My DigitalOcean pricing article has the full Droplet math.

The 4 GB bundle next to the servers I'd rent instead:

Against the budget providers, Lightsail costs about three times as much. In Europe, Hetzner and Netcup sell 4 GB for $7.05 to $9.25, with 20 TB of traffic or a flat rate. At 16 GB it's $84 on Lightsail against $19.05 on Hetzner and $30.15 on Netcup. The cheapest VPS comparison has the rest of the field.

I've paid for convenience myself: about $600 for my first month on Laravel Cloud, then $500+ a month on Railway, most of it for a busy database. Today one €80 dedicated server runs everything.

Which should you pick?

I think Lightsail is a fair deal for a small app that idles most of the day and stays under its transfer allowance. It stops being one when the app keeps the CPU busy, because the baseline throttles you, or when traffic grows, because $0.09 per GB adds up fast.

Where Ployz fits

A Lightsail instance is a bare server. Getting your app onto it, with HTTPS and deploys on every push, is your job. Ployz, which I build, does that part on a Lightsail instance or any Linux server:

ployz up --server ubuntu@your-instance-ip

That installs Ployz over SSH, builds the current directory and gives it an HTTPS address. Node, Python, Ruby, PHP, Go, Rust, Java and Elixir apps need no Dockerfile. Open TCP 80 and TCP and UDP 443 in the instance's firewall first, and use a bundle with at least 2 GB of RAM, because builds run on the server.

• Push to deploy: connect a GitHub repo and every push builds on your server, with no registry to run.
• Preview environments: every pull request gets its own HTTPS address on your servers, at no extra cost beyond the RAM it uses.
• Zero-downtime deploys: with a health check set, a new version has to pass it before the old one stops.
• No load balancer to rent: every server serves HTTPS itself, so the $18 Lightsail load balancer is optional.
• One-click Postgres, MySQL, Redis and MongoDB, with a sealed generated password and a DATABASE_URL your app can reference.
• More servers with one command, joined over an encrypted network.
• Coding agents: every command takes --json, and ployz setup agent lets Claude Code deploy for you.

A database can keep a mirror on a second server, synced when you ask, so you can restore from it or move the database there with seconds of downtime. It doesn't create servers for you, so you create the Lightsail instance first.

It's free on your own servers, custom domains included. Start free.

FAQ

Does a stopped Lightsail instance cost money?

Yes. Lightsail charges for instances and managed databases until you delete them, even when they're stopped. Snapshot the instance and delete it to stop paying.

Is Lightsail billed hourly or monthly?

Hourly, capped at the monthly price. The $5 bundle is $0.0067 an hour, so a full month costs $5 and a day costs about 16 cents.

What is AWS Lightsail used for?

Small websites, blogs, single-server apps and test environments. It suits anything that fits on one or two servers and wants a fixed price on an AWS account.

What are the limitations of AWS Lightsail?

The biggest is CPU: bundles up to $164 are burstable, and the $5 bundle sustains 5% of each vCPU. The others: overage at $0.09 to $0.17 per GB, transfer allowances that pool only across bundles of the same size, managed databases that top out at 32 GB of RAM, container nodes that top out at 4 vCPU and 8 GB, and no automatic snapshots for Windows instances or managed databases.

Should I use an IPv6-only bundle?

Only if everything that talks to the server can use IPv6. It saves $1.50 to $4 a month, and you can't attach a static IP to an IPv6-only instance. Visitors and APIs that only speak IPv4 can't reach it.

Is Lightsail cheaper than DigitalOcean?

They cost the same for the server. A 4 GB Lightsail bundle and a 4 GiB Droplet are both $24 a month with 4 TB of transfer. DigitalOcean is cheaper once you pass the allowance, at $0.01 per GiB against Lightsail's $0.09 per GB.

How I checked

I checked every price on 2026-10-08 on AWS's Lightsail pricing page and docs, and on DigitalOcean's, Hetzner's and Netcup's own pricing pages and docs, linked next to each number. Lightsail prices are for Linux in US East (N. Virginia), in USD before tax. Euro prices are converted at the ECB rate of about $1.12 (1.1177 on 7 October 2026), and the Hetzner numbers are before VAT, like AWS's. Netcup's are its listed prices, which include 19% German VAT. The burst behaviour comes from AWS's baseline CPU docs; I didn't load-test an instance. The three example apps are my own sizing, not AWS's. I build Ployz, so weigh the "Where Ployz fits" section with that in mind; the Lightsail numbers don't depend on it.

Run your app on a Lightsail instance or any server with Ployz, free: get started.