Route 53 Pricing Calculator

What Is Route 53 Pricing

Amazon Route 53 is AWS's highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. Route 53 pricing is based on three main components: hosted zones, DNS queries, and health checks. While individual costs are small, organizations managing hundreds of domains with millions of queries can accumulate significant monthly charges without careful planning.

This calculator estimates your Route 53 monthly costs based on the number of hosted zones, expected query volume, health check configurations, and domain registration needs.

Route 53 Cost Components

Component	Pricing Model	Key Rates
Hosted Zones	Per zone per month	$0.50/month for first 25 zones, $0.10/month for additional
Standard DNS Queries	Per million queries	$0.40 per million (first 1B queries/month)
Latency-Based Routing Queries	Per million queries	$0.60 per million
Geo DNS Queries	Per million queries	$0.70 per million
Health Checks	Per health check per month	$0.50-$2.00 depending on type
Domain Registration	Per domain per year	Varies by TLD ($12-$2,000+/year)
DNSSEC Signing	Per hosted zone per month	$0.75/month per zone
Resolver Endpoints	Per endpoint per direction	$0.125/hour per IP address

Health Check Types

Type	Price/Month	Description
Basic (HTTP/TCP)	$0.50	Check endpoint availability from multiple locations
HTTPS	$0.75	Same as basic with SSL/TLS verification
String matching	$1.00	Verify response body contains expected content
CloudWatch metric	$0.75	Health based on CloudWatch alarm status
Calculated	$1.00	Combine multiple health checks with AND/OR logic

Common Use Cases

• DNS architecture planning: Estimate costs before migrating DNS infrastructure to Route 53 from on-premises or another provider
• Multi-region deployment costing: Calculate the additional cost of latency-based or geolocation routing for globally distributed applications
• Health check optimization: Evaluate the cost of health check configurations and optimize check frequency and count
• Budget forecasting: Project monthly Route 53 costs for growing applications based on traffic projections and domain expansion plans
• Cost comparison: Compare Route 53 pricing against alternatives like Cloudflare DNS, Google Cloud DNS, or Azure DNS

Best Practices

1. Consolidate hosted zones — Each hosted zone costs $0.50/month. If you have many domains pointing to the same infrastructure, use fewer zones with more records rather than one zone per domain.
2. Use alias records for AWS resources — Alias queries to AWS resources (ELB, CloudFront, S3) are free. Always use alias records instead of CNAME records for AWS endpoints.
3. Right-size health checks — Basic HTTP checks at $0.50/month are sufficient for most endpoints. Use string matching ($1.00) only when simple availability checks are insufficient.
4. Monitor query volume — Unexpected DNS query spikes (from DDoS attacks, misconfigurations, or bot traffic) can increase costs. Set billing alerts for DNS query charges.
5. Evaluate DNSSEC necessity — At $0.75/month per zone, DNSSEC adds cost. Enable it for zones serving critical applications where DNS spoofing is a realistic threat.