Amazon SQS
AWS managed message queue, billed per request with standard and FIFO rates and a permanent free tier.
- Queues and background jobs
- Yes
- Not documented
- Not documented
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.
Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved
What the documentation says.
Each value below links to the page it was read from, with the sentence it came from. Criteria Amazon SQS does not publish are not listed.
Pricing
Free tier
Yes
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- AWS Price List API — AWSQueueService, us-east-1 ↗
“"description": "First 1,000,000 Amazon SQS Requests per month are free", "pricePerUnit": {"USD": "0.0000000000"}, "beginRange": "0", "endRange": "1000000"”
Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing
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.
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- AWS Price List API — AWSQueueService, us-east-1 ↗
“"$0.50 per million Amazon SQS FIFO requests in Tier1 in US East" [...] "$0.40 per million Amazon SQS standard requests in Tier1" [...] "$0.10 per million Amazon SQS fair queue requests in US East"”
Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing
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.
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- AWS Price List API — AWSQueueService, us-east-1 ↗
“"First 1,000,000 Amazon SQS Requests per month are free" [...] "$0.40 per million Amazon SQS standard requests in Tier1 in US East" [...] "$0.30 per million ... Tier2" [...] "$0.24 per million ... Tier3"”
Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing
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.
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- Amazon SQS Pricing — AWS ↗
“A single request can have from 1 to 10 messages, up to a maximum total payload of 1 MiB. [...] Each 64 KB chunk of a payload is billed as 1 request (for example, an API action with a 1 MiB payload is billed as 16 requests).”
Read 2026-09-06 · official docs
Dead letter queue
Supported
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- Amazon SQS Pricing — AWS ↗
“API actions for sending, receiving, deleting, and changing visibility of messages from FIFO queues are charged at FIFO rates. All other API requests are charged at standard rates.”
Read 2026-09-06 · official docs
When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.
Amazon SQS in the news
- SNS vs SQS vs EventBridge: 4x Message Size Gap [2026] - tech-insider.org
- Event-driven pipeline orchestration with Amazon MWAA and Airflow 3.0 - Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- SQS vs Kafka 2026: Throughput, Pricing & Migration - tech-insider.org
- Amazon SQS turns 20: Two decades of reliable messaging at scale - Amazon Web Services (AWS)