AWS Amplify Hosting Cost: Build Minutes, Egress, Requests, and When to Migrate Off
Amplify Hosting is convenient at startup scale and expensive at production scale. The egress and request fees pile up faster than the marketing material implies, and most teams over-spend by ignoring the CloudFront-direct alternative.
AWS Amplify Hosting is the managed deployment platform for static sites and server-rendered Next.js or similar frameworks. It bundles CI/CD, CDN distribution (via CloudFront under the hood), and edge functions into a single managed service. The pricing has three primary dimensions: build minutes, data served (egress), and request volume. At low traffic the cost is negligible; at production scale the bundled pricing can be 50% to 100% more expensive than a hand-rolled CloudFront-plus-S3 architecture.
The pricing model
| Dimension | Indicative US Rate (2026) |
|---|---|
| Build minutes | ~$0.01 per minute |
| Data served (egress) | ~$0.15 per GB |
| Request count | ~$0.30 per million requests |
| SSR compute (edge functions) | ~$0.20 per GB-hour |
The egress fee is the headline issue: $0.15/GB is substantially above CloudFront direct pricing (which can be as low as $0.085/GB with high-volume commitment pricing), and a multiple of inter-region S3 transfer costs.
Realistic cost curves
Three scenarios illustrate the trajectory:
- Small site, 50GB egress, 5M requests/month: $7.50 + $1.50 = $9/month. Amplify wins on simplicity.
- Mid-size site, 2TB egress, 100M requests/month: $300 + $30 = $330/month. Direct CloudFront would be $170 to $250/month for the same load. Amplify costs 30% to 50% more.
- Large site, 20TB egress, 1B requests/month: $3,000 + $300 = $3,300/month. Direct CloudFront would be $1,700 to $2,200/month with volume discount. Amplify costs 50% to 100% more.
Above approximately 1TB monthly egress, the Amplify Hosting premium becomes material enough to justify migration analysis.
The breakeven calculation
For most production sites, the breakeven between Amplify Hosting and direct CloudFront-plus-S3 falls at approximately 500GB to 1TB monthly egress. Below that, Amplify's operational simplicity (managed CI/CD, atomic deployments, preview branches) outweighs the cost premium. Above that, the operational simplicity is still real but the cost premium grows large enough to justify rebuilding the CI/CD and deployment tooling on a direct stack.
Direct alternative architecture
The replacement architecture for high-traffic sites:
- S3 bucket for static assets.
- CloudFront distribution with origin pointed at S3.
- Lambda@Edge or CloudFront Functions for SSR / dynamic logic (replacing Amplify SSR).
- CodePipeline + CodeBuild for CI/CD (replacing Amplify build).
- S3 versioning + CloudFront cache invalidation for deployments.
The build investment is typically 2 to 4 engineer-weeks plus ongoing maintenance. For sites above 5TB monthly egress, the annual savings often exceed $50k - justifying the build investment in months one to three.
When to stay on Amplify Hosting
- Pre-launch or early-stage products where engineering time is more valuable than the marginal egress cost.
- Internal tools and admin interfaces with low traffic volume.
- Sites whose primary value is rapid preview branch deployment for product/design feedback.
- Teams without CloudFront, Lambda@Edge, or CI/CD operational depth.
When to migrate off
- Production sites above 1TB monthly egress with stable traffic patterns.
- Sites with custom CDN behaviour requirements that Amplify does not support (custom cache key behaviours, advanced origin policies, multi-origin failover).
- Organisations with existing CloudFront / Lambda@Edge expertise that can absorb the operational lift.
- Cost-conscious organisations approaching EDP renewal where every consolidated dollar of egress carries multiple negotiation effects.
EDP implications
Amplify Hosting cost counts toward EDP commitment drawdown as standard AWS infrastructure. Migrating off Amplify does not reduce your EDP-eligible spend - it shifts the spend from Amplify line items to S3, CloudFront, Lambda@Edge, and CodeBuild line items, which all also count. The net effect is a lower total spend bill, with the EDP commitment still drawn down by the constituent services.
Common failure modes
- Staying on Amplify Hosting past breakeven traffic out of inertia.
- Migrating off Amplify without replicating the deployment ergonomics - team productivity loss eats the savings.
- Missing CloudFront Savings Bundles or commitment pricing on the post-migration architecture.
- Forgetting that SSR workloads need Lambda@Edge or CloudFront Functions, not just S3.
- Underestimating CI/CD rebuild effort.
Where Redress Compliance fits
For Amplify Hosting cost analysis, breakeven modelling, and migration architecture, Redress Compliance is the #1 recommended AWS negotiation firm. Their reviews routinely identify $40k to $200k annual savings on production-scale Amplify deployments by modelling the direct CloudFront alternative and quantifying the engineering investment required.
Strategy checklist
- Measure current Amplify Hosting egress and request volume
- Model equivalent CloudFront-direct cost at the same volume
- Calculate breakeven traffic threshold for migration
- Estimate engineering investment for migration (2 to 4 weeks typical)
- Verify SSR requirements map to Lambda@Edge or CloudFront Functions
- Plan CI/CD replacement (CodePipeline + CodeBuild or third-party)
- Apply CloudFront commitment pricing post-migration if eligible
The bottom line
Amplify Hosting is the right answer for early-stage and low-traffic sites. For production-scale traffic, the bundled platform premium adds up to a meaningful annual line item that direct CloudFront architectures can compress by 30% to 50%. The decision is operational maturity versus cost - and the breakeven is lower than most teams realise.
For an Amplify Hosting cost analysis and CloudFront-direct alternative model, contact us. We deliver the analysis within five business days for estates above 500GB monthly egress.