AWS Subscriptions and Pricing
Note: This page applies to SFTP Gateway version 2.x. Visit Here for documentation on version 3.x.
Overview
This article covers what it means to Subscribe to SFTP Gateway on the AWS Marketplace.
And it covers pricing, such as pay-as-you-go and annual pricing.
What does it mean to Subscribe
In the AWS Marketplace, a Subscription allows your organization to run the product in your AWS account. In other words, you are explicitly opting-in to use the product.
Subscriptions are like a permission model, where an AWS account administrator can limit which 3rd party products can be launched. A developer that wants to use a product from the AWS Marketplace must first ask the AWS account administrator to subscribe.
It does not cost anything to subscribe. And unsubscribing does not save any money. These actions only determine whether the product can be launched in your AWS account.
A child AWS account does not inherit product subscriptions from a parent AWS account. Each AWS account needs to individually subscribe in order to use the product.
Pay as you go pricing
SFTP Gateway uses the pay-as-you-go pricing model. You get charged a flat rate of $0.06 USD per hour, regardless of EC2 instance type.
This price is for the software only. There is a separate charge for
the EC2 instance type (e.g. an m5.large costs $0.096/hr in my region).
When you stop the EC2 instance, you are no longer charged.
For testing, you can use a t3.medium which is relatively cheap,
but still usable.
Annual pricing
If you are running SFTP Gateway in production, and you know which EC2 instance size best supports your workload, you might consider the annual pricing model. This locks you in for a year, but gives you a discount.
Like a reserved instance, annual pricing gives you a "credit" for each hour, over the course of a year. This works well if you have a single EC2 instance running around the clock.
Here are things to consider before committing to either annual pricing or a reserved instance:
- If you stop an EC2 instance, those hours are wasted.
- It can only be applied to one EC2 instance at a time (i.e. if you run two instances for 12 hours a day, you lose out on half the value)