Price Route 53 hosted zones, tiered DNS queries and health checks, allowing for alias records that answer free.
Route 53 bills a flat monthly charge per hosted zone, a tiered charge per million queries that steps down after the first billion, and a monthly charge per health check. The detail that changes the total is alias records: a query answered by an alias pointing at a CloudFront distribution, an Elastic Load Balancer or an S3 website endpoint is free, so replacing CNAMEs with aliases removes those queries from the bill entirely. DNS looks like a rounding error until a chatty client with a short TTL multiplies query volume tenfold, at which point the query line is larger than the hosted zones and health checks combined.
Route 53 Query Cost
cost = zones × zone rate + first billion billable queries × standard rate + remainder × overage rate + health checks × health check rate.
cost = zones × zone rate + first billion billable queries × standard rate + remainder × overage rate + health checks × health check rate. Route 53 bills a flat monthly charge per hosted zone, a tiered charge per million queries that steps down after the first billion, and a monthly charge per health check. The detail that changes the total is alias records: a query answered by an alias pointing at a CloudFront distribution, an Elastic Load Balancer or an S3 website endpoint is free, so replacing CNAMEs with aliases removes those queries from the bill entirely.
DNS looks like a rounding error until a chatty client with a short TTL multiplies query volume tenfold, at which point the query line is larger than the hosted zones and health checks combined.
This calculator takes 8 inputs: Hosted zones, Price per hosted zone per month, Queries per month, Share answered by alias records to AWS resources, Price per million queries in the first billion, Price per million queries beyond a billion, Health checks, Price per health check per month. The pre-filled defaults are a realistic starting point — replace them with figures from your own environment for a result you can act on.
Queries answered by an alias record whose target is an AWS resource such as CloudFront, an Elastic Load Balancer, an API Gateway endpoint or an S3 website. Standard records, CNAMEs and alias records pointing at another record in the same zone are all charged.
The defaults reflect published list prices at the time of writing, including the cheaper rate for hosted zones beyond the first 25 which is not modelled here. Confirm the current tiers on the Amazon Route 53 pricing page and adjust the rate fields.