Pricing Plan

Weather Platform Cost Analysis

Understanding the cost structure of the Weather Platform helps with budget planning and optimization decisions.

Total Cost Summary

Cost Breakdown by Service

Core Platform Services

AWS Amplify - $0.19/month ($2.28/year)

• Usage: Web app hosting and CI/CD pipeline
• Build time: 5 minutes per month
• Instance: Standard (8 GB Memory, 4 vCPUs)
• Storage: 0.03 GB data stored
• SSR requests: 20 per day
• Data served: 0.003 GB per month

AWS Glue ETL - $0.36/month ($4.32/year)

• Usage: Data processing and transformation
• Apache Spark DPUs: 2 units
• Python Shell DPUs: 0.0625 units
• Processing: Daily ETL jobs for weather data

Data Storage & Processing

AWS Glue Crawlers - $0.07/month ($0.84/year)

• Usage: Automatic schema discovery
• Crawlers: 1 crawler for data lake

AWS Glue Data Catalog - $0.03/month ($0.36/year)

• Usage: Metadata storage and access
• Requests: 3,000 access requests per month
• Objects: 3,000 objects stored per month

S3 Storage - $0.05/month ($0.60/year total)

• Data Lake (US East N. Virginia): $0.04/month
  • Storage: 1 GB standard storage
  • Requests: 1,000 PUT/COPY/POST, 20,000 GET requests
• Dataset (US East Ohio): $0.01/month
  • Storage: 0.3 GB standard storage
  • Requests: 100 PUT/COPY/POST, 1,000 GET requests

Content Delivery & IoT

Amazon CloudFront - $0.02/month ($0.24/year)

• Usage: Global content delivery for datasets
• HTTPS requests: 20,000 per month
• Data transfer: 0.01 GB per month

AWS IoT Core (MQTT) - $0.01/month ($0.12/year)

• Usage: Weather sensor connectivity
• Devices: 3 IoT devices
• Messages: 1 message per device
• Message size: 430 bytes average
• Rules: 1 rule triggered per message

Compute & Authentication

AWS Lambda - $0.01/month ($0.12/year)

• Usage: Backend API functions
• Architecture: x86
• Requests: 1,000 per month
• Ephemeral storage: 512 MB

Amazon Cognito - $0.00/month (Free Tier)

• Usage: User authentication and authorization
• Monthly Active Users: 4 users
• Advanced security: Disabled (basic security included)

AWS Step Functions - $0.00/month (Free Tier)

• Usage: Dataset update orchestration
• Workflow requests: 4 per month
• State transitions: 70 per workflow

Cost Optimization Strategies

Development vs Production

Development (Sandbox):

• Use npx ampx sandbox for development
• Automatically shuts down when not in use
• Minimal data processing costs

Production:

• Fixed monthly costs as shown above
• Scales with actual usage

Free Tier Benefits

Services with generous free tiers:

• Cognito: 50,000 MAUs free (currently using 4)
• Step Functions: 4,000 state transitions free per month
• Lambda: 1M requests + 400,000 GB-seconds free per month
• IoT Core: 2.25M messages free per month

Scaling Considerations

Cost scales with:

• Number of IoT devices and message frequency
• Data processing volume (Glue ETL runtime)
• CloudFront requests and data transfer
• Storage growth over time

Cost remains fixed:

• Amplify hosting (unless build time increases)
• Basic infrastructure components

Regional Cost Differences

US East (N. Virginia) - Primary region:

• Most services hosted here
• Typically lowest AWS pricing
• Total regional cost: ~$0.73/month

US East (Ohio) - Secondary region:

• Dataset storage only
• Slightly different S3 pricing
• Total regional cost: ~$0.01/month

Annual Budget

Current scale: ~$10/year

• Small lab environment
• 3-4 weather stations
• Regular development activity

Cost Monitoring

Cost Tags

Tag all resources for tracking:

• Project: WeatherPlatform
• Environment: Development/Production
• Owner: ITea-Lab
• Purpose: Research

Legal Disclaimer

Cost estimate details:

• Currency: USD
• Locale: en_US
• Created: October 1, 2025
• Visit the Repo to view the Pricing file