Compare Step Functions Standard state-transition pricing against Express request plus GB-second pricing for the same workflow.
The two workflow types have completely different meters. Standard charges for every state transition, so a chatty workflow with retries and a large Map state can cost more than the work it orchestrates. Express charges a small per-request fee plus a GB-second duration fee, which makes high-volume short workflows dramatically cheaper — at the price of at-most-five-minute runtimes, at-least-once semantics and execution history that lives in CloudWatch Logs instead of the console. Check the current transition and GB-second prices for your region. Standard-versus-Express is usually a one-to-two order of magnitude cost decision at high volume, and it is far cheaper to make deliberately at design time than to migrate a state machine after the bill arrives.
Step Functions Cost
Standard cost = executions × transitions per execution ÷ 1000 × transition price. Express cost = executions ÷ 1,000,000 × request price + memory GB × duration seconds × executions × GB-second price.
Transition count
transitions per month = executions × transitions per execution; retries and Map iterations each add a transition.
Standard cost = executions × transitions per execution ÷ 1000 × transition price. Express cost = executions ÷ 1,000,000 × request price + memory GB × duration seconds × executions × GB-second price. The two workflow types have completely different meters. Standard charges for every state transition, so a chatty workflow with retries and a large Map state can cost more than the work it orchestrates. Express charges a small per-request fee plus a GB-second duration fee, which makes high-volume short workflows dramatically cheaper — at the price of at-most-five-minute runtimes, at-least-once semantics and execution history that lives in CloudWatch Logs instead of the console. Check the current transition and GB-second prices for your region.
Standard-versus-Express is usually a one-to-two order of magnitude cost decision at high volume, and it is far cheaper to make deliberately at design time than to migrate a state machine after the bill arrives.
This calculator takes 8 inputs: Workflow type to price, Executions per month, State transitions per execution, Average execution duration, Express memory tier, Standard price per 1000 transitions, Express price per million requests, Express price per GB-second. The pre-filled defaults are a realistic starting point — replace them with figures from your own environment for a result you can act on.
Yes. In a Standard workflow every retry attempt, every Catch fallback and every iteration of a Map or Parallel branch is a billed transition, so a workflow with aggressive retry policies can bill several times its nominal state count during an incident.
When you need exactly-once execution semantics, runs longer than five minutes, a durable visual execution history, or the .sync integration pattern that waits on a long-running job. Express trades all of those away for price.