Pricing last verified: April 2026. Plans and pricing may change — check the vendor site for current details.
Pricing Overview
AWS Glue uses a fully usage-based pricing model with no upfront costs or monthly minimums. The free tier covers up to 3 million bytes processed per month, which is enough for small-scale data discovery and catalog operations. Beyond the free tier, the primary cost is $0.40 per GB scanned for AWS Glue Data Catalog and ETL jobs, calculated based on the volume of data your jobs actually process. This serverless model means you pay nothing when jobs are idle — there are no always-on clusters to maintain. For organizations already running on AWS, Glue integrates natively with S3, Redshift, Athena, and other services without cross-platform data transfer fees within the same region.
Plan Comparison
| Component | Price | What It Covers |
|---|---|---|
| Free Tier | $0 | First 3 million bytes processed per month, 1 million objects stored in Data Catalog |
| ETL Jobs | $0.40/GB scanned | Spark-based and Python shell ETL job execution |
| Data Catalog | $0.40/GB scanned | Metadata storage and crawlers beyond free tier |
| Interactive Sessions | $0.40/GB scanned | Notebook-based development and testing |
| DataBrew | $0.40/GB scanned | Visual data preparation without writing code |
Unlike seat-based competitors, AWS Glue has no per-user charges. A team of 20 engineers pays the same rate as a solo developer — cost scales entirely with data volume. The $0.40 per GB rate applies consistently across ETL, catalog, and DataBrew workloads, making cost estimation straightforward once you know your data volumes.
Hidden Costs and Considerations
The $0.40 per GB rate looks simple, but total costs depend heavily on job efficiency. Poorly optimized Spark jobs that scan full tables instead of partitioned subsets can multiply your bill quickly — scanning a 500 GB table daily costs $200 per day versus $20 if you partition effectively. AWS Glue crawlers that re-catalog unchanged data sources add unnecessary scanning costs. Data transfer between AWS regions incurs standard AWS egress charges on top of Glue processing fees. There are no annual commitment discounts for Glue itself, though AWS Enterprise Discount Programs may apply to overall AWS spend.
Cost Estimates by Team Size
A solo data engineer running small ETL jobs processing 50 GB per month pays approximately $20 per month ($0.40 times 50 GB). A 5-person data team processing 500 GB monthly pays approximately $200 per month — still far below the cost of maintaining equivalent self-hosted Spark infrastructure. A 20-person data organization processing 5 TB per month pays approximately $2,000 per month for Glue alone, at which point evaluating reserved capacity options or alternative architectures becomes worthwhile.
How AWS Glue Pricing Compares
AWS Glue's usage-based model differs fundamentally from the seat-based pricing of most competitors. Dagster charges $29 per month for Pro with per-user scaling, meaning a 10-person team pays $290 per month regardless of data volume. dbt Cloud starts at $25 per month for Pro and $100 per month for Team plans. Hevo Data offers a free tier for 1 million rows and Pro at $25 per month for 10 million rows. For small data volumes, competitors are cheaper — a team processing under 50 GB monthly pays less with Dagster or dbt. For large-scale pipelines processing terabytes, Glue's per-GB model can be more cost-effective since there are no per-seat charges and the serverless model eliminates infrastructure management costs.