Estimate Kinesis costs for on-demand and provisioned capacity with enhanced fan-out, retention tiers, and mode comparison.
Last verified: May 2026
Your team's clickstream pipeline ingests 5 MB/s peak with 3 consumer apps. Currently on Provisioned mode with 10 shards (over-provisioned for headroom) + 3 enhanced fan-out consumers = $1,800/month. The estimator suggests downsizing to 6 shards (matches actual peak) with auto-scaling, dropping enhanced fan-out (consumers don't actually saturate the 2 MB/s standard share) = $620/month. Net savings: $1,180/month with no impact on consumer performance.
The Kinesis Data Streams Cost Estimator calculates monthly costs for both on-demand and provisioned capacity modes. It factors in shard hours, PUT payload units, enhanced fan-out consumer fees, extended data retention beyond 24 hours, and long-term retention pricing. The tool compares both modes side-by-side to help you choose the most cost-effective option.
The estimator calculates Provisioned mode cost as: shard count × hourly rate × hours + PUT payload units (each 25 KB chunk × $0.014/M) + extended retention (per-shard-hour) + enhanced fan-out (per-consumer-shard-hour + per-GB retrieval). On-Demand mode uses stream-hour fee + ingestion GB rate + retrieval GB rate. The compare view shows the break-even point where on-demand becomes more expensive than provisioned.
On-demand mode is not 'cheaper' than provisioned — it's typically 2-3x more expensive at steady state. The value is eliminating shard management and over-provisioning. If your traffic is predictable, provisioned mode with auto-scaling is significantly cheaper.
Enhanced fan-out is brilliant when you have multiple consumers reading from the same stream — each gets dedicated 2 MB/s throughput instead of sharing. The catch: the per-consumer-shard-hour fee adds up. With 5 consumers and 10 shards, that's $0.015 × 5 × 10 × 730 = $548/month JUST for fan-out fees. Always evaluate if your consumer mix actually saturates standard throughput first.
Kinesis Data Firehose is often the right answer instead of Data Streams + custom consumer for 'just dump to S3/Redshift' workloads. Firehose is ~$0.029/GB delivered with no shard management, dramatically cheaper than Data Streams + Lambda + S3 PUT operations for typical ingest pipelines.
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