Pricing in SFTP Gateway
TLDR - Quick Summary
What: How SFTP Gateway is priced on AWS — a license from Thorn Technologies (BYOL, recommended) or an hourly marketplace plan
BYOL license (annual, per license): Standard $999 (up to 10 users), Professional $2,999 (up to 100 users), Enterprise — contact us (1,000+ users)
Marketplace pay-as-you-go: Standard from $0.08/hr (5 users), Professional $0.15/hr (100 users, Long-Term Support); software charge on top of the EC2 instance
Free trial: 30 days from the web admin on a BYOL deployment, no license key required
Stop charges: Stop (de-allocate) or terminate the EC2 instance in the AWS console
Overview
There are two ways to pay for SFTP Gateway on AWS:
- SFTP Gateway (BYOL) — the recommended way to get started. The marketplace listing is free: your AWS bill only ever shows the EC2, EBS and S3 costs. You license the software directly from Thorn Technologies, after a free 30-day trial.
- Marketplace pay-as-you-go listings (Standard, Professional) — the license is baked into the listing and AWS bills an hourly software charge on top of the instance. The Professional listing is in Long-Term Support and is being retired; see Professional vs BYOL.
Both run the same software. For a feature-by-feature comparison of the tiers, see Product Plan Tiers.
SFTP Gateway (BYOL) — license pricing
Deploy the SFTP Gateway (BYOL) listing, then start the 30-day free trial from the web admin interface. When the trial ends, purchase the license tier that matches your user count:
| License | Users | Price | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | up to 10 SFTP users | $999 per year, per license | Development, testing and small or non-critical workloads |
| Professional | up to 100 SFTP users | $2,999 per year, per license | Production environments that need high availability and reliable performance |
| Enterprise | 1,000+ SFTP users | Contact us | Large deployments with advanced requirements and dedicated, SLA-backed support |
Prices are in USD and are billed annually per license. Licenses are purchased per VM instance: set the quantity at checkout to the number of SFTP Gateway instances you run. The same license works on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and the container, so you can move clouds without buying again.
To purchase or to size a larger deployment, book a call with our Sales team or email sales@thorntech.com. The step-by-step checkout is in Purchasing a License. Current prices are always on thorntech.com/sftp-gateway.
Marketplace pay-as-you-go pricing
The pay-as-you-go listings charge for every hour the EC2 instance runs, whether or not it is transferring files. This is a software charge on top of the cost of the instance.
SFTP Gateway Standard
SFTP Gateway Standard supports up to 5 SFTP users and starts at $0.08 USD per hour:
- USD
0.08/hour (USD 58.40/month) for instances with 1-2 vCPU(s). - USD
0.09/hour (USD 65.70/month) for instances with 4 or more vCPUs.
You can run SFTP Gateway Standard on a t3.small (1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM) instance or better, which
costs about 0.02/hour.
SFTP Gateway Professional (Long-Term Support)
SFTP Gateway Professional supports up to 100 SFTP users at a flat rate of $0.15 per hour
(USD 108/month). In a production environment you might run this on a single m5.large
(2 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM), which costs about 0.096/hour.
The Professional listing receives critical security patches only and reaches End of Maintenance in June 2027 and End of Life in June 2028. New deployments should use BYOL, and existing Professional deployments can migrate by following Professional vs BYOL.
SFTP Gateway Enterprise
SFTP Gateway Enterprise is intended for large enterprises with custom development and integration needs. Contact us at sales@thorntech.com so we can learn more about your requirements and write a custom proposal for your use case.
Annual pricing
If you run a pay-as-you-go listing in production and you know which EC2 instance size supports your workload, the annual pricing option locks you in for a year in exchange for a discount. Like a reserved instance, annual pricing gives you a "credit" for each hour over the course of a year, which works well for a single instance running around the clock. A BYOL license is the simpler way to get a fixed yearly cost.
How to stop being charged
To stop being charged for a pay-as-you-go listing, stop (de-allocate) or terminate the EC2 instance in the AWS console. Stopping the instance also stops the metering for the underlying infrastructure. A BYOL deployment has no software charge to stop; the license simply expires at the end of its term.