# 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.

## iScore

74 / 100 (80% interval 67–82), rank 1 of 10 in queues — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Read this score with care:
- Adoption is thin: 0 of 1 criteria are scored, so it sits near the category middle with a wide interval (10–90). Read the interval, not the point.
- Documented but not scored, because the page states it as text with no comparable number or a yes/limited/no (a one-time, usage-based or other-vendor price, or a per-site choice): minimum_paid_price, concurrency_limit. Read them on the provider page; the score neither rewards nor penalises what it could not compare.

Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every queues peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/queues/amazon-sqs/alternatives/

- Price: 86 (64–100), weight 31%, 2 of 4 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: free_card_required, minimum_paid_price
- Capacity and limits: 52 (45–58), weight 25%, 4 of 5 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: concurrency_limit
- Capabilities: 88 (59–100), weight 6%, 1 of 1 criteria scored
- Trust and compliance: 83 (70–95), weight 18%, 10 of 12 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: dedicated_infrastructure, support_included
- Evidence: 92 (92–92), weight 10%, 4 of 4 criteria scored
- Adoption: 50 (10–90), weight 10%, 0 of 1 criteria scored

## 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 2026-09-13)
- Kind of free offer: Free tier ([source](https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AWSQueueService/current/us-east-1/index.json), read 2026-09-13)
- Entry paid plan: No paid plan or minimum fee; billed per request after the free 1 million requests a month. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/sqs/pricing/), read 2026-09-13)
- 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)

### Infrastructure

- Regions: 34 commercial AWS Regions plus 2 AWS GovCloud (US) Regions listed in the SQS service endpoints table. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/sqs-service.html), read 2026-09-13)
- Uptime SLA: 99.9% monthly uptime per AWS Region, one figure with no configuration split. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/messaging/sla/), read 2026-09-14)

### 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)
- Message retention: 4 days by default; configurable from 60 seconds up to 14 days per queue. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSDeveloperGuide/quotas-messages.html), read 2026-09-13)
- Maximum delay: 15 minutes maximum per-message delay (message timer) or per-queue delay; default is 0 seconds. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSDeveloperGuide/quotas-messages.html), read 2026-09-13)
- Concurrency: Approximately 120,000 in-flight messages per standard queue (received but not yet deleted); API call rate on standard queues is nearly unlimited. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSDeveloperGuide/quotas-queues.html), read 2026-09-13)
- Dead letter queue: Supported ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/sqs/pricing/), read 2026-09-06)

### Compliance

- SOC 2: Listed as SOC-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/services-in-scope/SOC/), read 2026-09-13)
- ISO 27001: Covered under AWS's account-wide ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification — not scoped per-service the way SOC, HIPAA and PCI DSS are on AWS's own site. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/iso-27001-faqs/), read 2026-09-12)
- HIPAA: Listed as a HIPAA-eligible service on AWS's own reference page. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-eligible-services-reference/), read 2026-09-13)
- GDPR / data residency: AWS customers can process personal data on all AWS services in compliance with GDPR, and choose the storage type and geographic region for their data. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/gdpr-center/), read 2026-09-12)
- PCI DSS: Listed as PCI DSS-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/services-in-scope/PCI/), read 2026-09-13)
- Encryption at rest: Server-side encryption of queue contents with SQS-managed keys (SSE-SQS) or AWS KMS keys (SSE-KMS). ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSDeveloperGuide/sqs-server-side-encryption.html), read 2026-09-13)
- Customer-managed keys: Supported via SSE-KMS: queues can use a customer managed KMS key created and policy-controlled in AWS KMS. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSDeveloperGuide/sqs-server-side-encryption.html), read 2026-09-13)
- Role-based access control: IAM identity-based policies on users, groups and roles plus resource-based queue policies control access to queues and actions. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSDeveloperGuide/sqs-overview-of-managing-access.html), read 2026-09-13)
- Private networking / VPC: Interface VPC endpoints (AWS PrivateLink) let a VPC reach SQS privately, including FIPS endpoints; HTTPS endpoints only. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSDeveloperGuide/sqs-internetwork-traffic-privacy.html), read 2026-09-13)

## 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/)
- [Amazon SQS vs Cloudflare Queues](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-sqs-vs-cloudflare-queues/)
- [Amazon SQS vs Hatchet](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-sqs-vs-hatchet/)
- [Amazon SQS vs Inngest](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-sqs-vs-inngest/)
- [Amazon SQS vs Temporal](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-sqs-vs-temporal/)
- [Amazon SQS vs Trigger.dev](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-sqs-vs-trigger-dev/)
- [Amazon SQS vs Zeplo](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-sqs-vs-zeplo/)