# Amazon SQS

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/queues/amazon-sqs/

AWS managed message queue, billed per request with standard and FIFO rates and a permanent free tier.

## Who it suits

AWS-resident systems that want a queue with a permanent free million requests a month and no capacity to plan — SQS scales without a throughput setting to choose.

Consider something else if Billing is per request rather than per message, and a 1 MiB payload counts as sixteen, so chatty polling or large messages cost far more than the message count suggests.

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: Yes ([source](https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AWSQueueService/current/us-east-1/index.json), read 2026-09-06)
- Pricing model: Per request, not per message: every API action counts, and a 1 MiB payload is billed as 16 requests. FIFO queues cost $0.50 per million against standard's $0.40 in us-east-1, and fair queue requests add $0.10 per million on top of the standard rate. ([source](https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AWSQueueService/current/us-east-1/index.json), read 2026-09-06)

### Queues

- Included per month: 1,000,000 requests a month free, permanently and across all regions. Beyond that, standard queues are $0.40 per million in us-east-1, falling to $0.30 above 100 billion and $0.24 above 200 billion. ([source](https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AWSQueueService/current/us-east-1/index.json), read 2026-09-06)
- Maximum message size: 256 KB per message. A single request carries 1 to 10 messages up to 1 MiB total, and each 64 KB chunk of payload is billed as one request. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/sqs/pricing/), read 2026-09-06)
- Dead letter queue: Supported ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/sqs/pricing/), read 2026-09-06)

## Compared with

- [Amazon SQS vs Upstash QStash](https://inetgeek.com/compare/qstash-vs-amazon-sqs/)
- [Amazon SQS vs Google Cloud Pub/Sub](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-sqs-vs-google-pubsub/)
- [Amazon SQS vs Azure Queue Storage](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-sqs-vs-azure-queue-storage/)