Estimate SQS costs for Standard and FIFO queues with 64KB chunking, request volume, and free tier calculation.
Last verified: April 2026
Total messages sent to the queue per month
Messages > 64 KB are billed as multiple requests (ceil(size / 64 KB))
Average number of times each message is received (increase for retries or visibility timeout expirations)
Data transferred out to the internet (first 1 GB free, then $0.09/GB)
Standard queues ($0.40/million) offer maximum throughput, best-effort ordering, and at-least-once delivery. FIFO queues ($0.50/million) guarantee exactly-once processing and strict ordering, with a throughput limit of 300 messages/second (or 3,000 with batching).
Each 64 KB chunk of a message payload is billed as a separate request. A single API call with a 256 KB message body is billed as 4 requests. This applies to SendMessage, ReceiveMessage, and DeleteMessage operations.
Use long polling (WaitTimeSeconds > 0) to reduce costs. A ReceiveMessage with long polling counts as only 1 request even if it returns empty, reducing the number of empty receives compared to short polling which returns immediately.
SendMessageBatch and DeleteMessageBatch can process up to 10 messages per API call. However, each message in the batch is billed individually. Batching reduces network overhead and improves throughput but does not reduce per-message request costs.
SNS is best for fan-out pub/sub patterns ($0.50/million publishes). EventBridge is ideal for event-driven architectures with content-based filtering ($1.00/million events). SQS excels at decoupling microservices with reliable message queuing at the lowest per-message cost.
Output will appear here...The AWS SQS Cost Estimator calculates monthly costs for Standard and FIFO queues based on request volume, message size, and free tier eligibility. SQS charges per request with 64 KB chunks, meaning a 256 KB message counts as four requests. The tool accounts for send, receive, delete, and change visibility operations, and compares Standard vs. FIFO pricing.
Your e-commerce platform uses an SQS Standard queue to decouple order processing. At 200,000 orders per day with 2 KB messages, the estimator shows you are well within the free tier for sends. But the three Lambda consumers each poll the queue every second, generating 7.8 million empty receives per month. You enable long polling with WaitTimeSeconds=20, and the empty receives drop to near zero, saving $3/month in requests and significantly reducing Lambda invocation costs.
FIFO queues cost 25% more per request than Standard, but the real cost difference is throughput. FIFO caps at 3,000 messages/second with batching. If you need ordering only within a subset of messages, use MessageGroupId on a FIFO queue to get per-group ordering without sacrificing overall throughput.
Long polling (WaitTimeSeconds=20) reduces costs significantly by eliminating empty ReceiveMessage responses. A Lambda polling an empty Standard queue every second generates 2.6 million empty requests per month. Long polling cuts that to near zero by waiting for messages to arrive.
SQS bills each 64 KB chunk as a separate request. If you send and receive a 256 KB message, that is 4 + 4 = 8 billable requests for a single message round-trip. For large payloads, store the body in S3 and send only the S3 reference via SQS using the Extended Client Library.
The estimator calculates total monthly requests by counting send, receive, and delete operations for your message volume. It divides each message by 64 KB to determine chunk count, multiplies by the number of operations, then applies Standard ($0.40/million) or FIFO ($0.50/million) pricing. The free tier of 1 million requests is subtracted from the total before calculating the final cost.
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