Route 53 health checks pricing and cost per endpoint
The headline rate is $0.75 a month. Most real checks need HTTPS and a content match, and each of those is billed on top. Enter your endpoints to see what the checks and their alarms actually cost.
One endpoint outside AWS, per month
Route 53 health check cost calculator
LiveOptional features on every check
Rates read from the AWS Price List for Route 53 and for CloudWatch in US East (N. Virginia), in USD: $0.75 per outside check and $2.00 per option; $0.50 per AWS-endpoint check after 50 free and $1.00 per option; $0.10 per standard alarm after 10 free. List prices before any private pricing or savings plan.
How much do Route 53 health checks cost?
Amazon Route 53 charges $0.75 a month for a basic health check on an endpoint outside AWS and $0.50 for one on an AWS endpoint in your own account, where the first 50 are free. Each optional feature (HTTPS, string matching, the fast 10 second interval and latency measurement) adds $2.00 a month on an outside endpoint and $1.00 on an AWS one. So a realistic HTTPS check on a site hosted outside AWS is $2.75 a month, HTTPS with a content check is $4.75, and a check with all four options is $8.75, nearly twelve times the headline price. None of them checks your SSL certificate.
Most write-ups repeat the $0.50 and $0.75 figures and stop. The part that decides your bill is the option list, because it is priced per feature and per check, it is charged in full even inside the free 50, and HTTPS, the one option almost every public site needs, is on it. The figures on this page come from AWS's own machine-readable price list, so each one can be checked.
The short version
- Outside AWS, basic
- $0.75 a month, no free allowance
- AWS endpoint, basic
- First 50 free, then $0.50 a month
- Each optional feature
- $2.00 outside AWS, $1.00 on AWS, never free
- One outside HTTPS check
- $2.75 a month, $33 a year
- Alerts
- CloudWatch alarm, 10 free, then $0.10 each
Route 53 health check cost with HTTPS, string matching and fast interval
Each row adds one more option to the row above it, in the order most teams turn them on. The last column is an AWS endpoint that sits inside the free 50: the check itself costs nothing there, and every dollar in that column is option fees.
| Configuration | What it adds | Outside AWS | AWS, past 50 | AWS, inside free 50 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic check | HTTP or TCP, 30 second interval, pass or fail | $0.75 | $0.50 | $0.00 |
| + HTTPS | required for any site served only over TLS | $2.75 | $1.50 | $1.00 |
| + String matching | searches the first 5,120 bytes of the body | $4.75 | $2.50 | $2.00 |
| + Fast interval | each checker every 10 seconds instead of 30 | $6.75 | $3.50 | $3.00 |
| + Latency measurement | latency graphs in CloudWatch | $8.75 | $4.50 | $4.00 |
The real entry price
$2.75
A public site that redirects HTTP to HTTPS needs the HTTPS option to be checked properly, so this, not $0.75, is what a check on a normal website costs outside AWS.
Every option on
11.7x
$8.75 against the $0.75 headline. Four $2.00 options are worth more than ten basic checks, which is why the option list, not the check count, is where to look first.
The free 50 is not free
$50
Fifty HTTPS checks on EC2 instances in your account: the checks are free, the HTTPS option on each one is not. Add string matching and it is $100 a month.
Route 53 health check cost for 10, 20, 50 and 100 endpoints
Monthly totals with one standard CloudWatch alarm per check, the first ten free. The content column adds string matching, which is how you catch a page that returns 200 with an error message on it. The last two columns are the UptimeHub plan that covers the same count; keyword checks start on Pro.
| Endpoints | Outside AWS, HTTPS | Outside AWS, HTTPS and content | AWS endpoints, HTTPS | UptimeHub, uptime | UptimeHub, with keyword |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $2.75 | $4.75 | $1.00 | Starter, $24 yearly or $49 monthly | Pro, $49 yearly or $99 monthly |
| 5 | $13.75 | $23.75 | $5.00 | Starter, $24 yearly or $49 monthly | Pro, $49 yearly or $99 monthly |
| 10 | $27.50 | $47.50 | $10.00 | Starter, $24 yearly or $49 monthly | Pro, $49 yearly or $99 monthly |
| 20 | $56.00 | $96.00 | $21.00 | Starter, $24 yearly or $49 monthly | Pro, $49 yearly or $99 monthly |
| 50 | $141.50 | $241.50 | $54.00 | Pro, $49 yearly or $99 monthly | Pro, $49 yearly or $99 monthly |
| 100 | $284.00 | $484.00 | $134.00 | Pro, $49 yearly or $99 monthly | Pro, $49 yearly or $99 monthly |
Where Route 53 stops being the cheap option
For HTTPS checks outside AWS, the 9th endpoint takes Route 53 past UptimeHub Starter billed yearly ($24.75 against $24), and the 18th passes Starter billed monthly ($50.30 against $49). With a content check on each, the 11th endpoint passes Pro billed yearly ($52.35 against $49) and the 21st passes Pro billed monthly ($100.85 against $99).
Where Route 53 stays cheaper
On AWS endpoints in your own account. Twenty HTTPS checks on EC2 are $21 a month with alarms, under Starter at $24, and checks on load balancers are not billed at all. If everything you watch lives in one AWS account and you only need an email when it fails, stay on Route 53.
What a Route 53 health check does not include
Route 53 health checks were built to steer DNS, and they are very good at it. Used as an uptime monitor, several things a buyer expects are either extra meters or missing.
No alerting of its own
Notifications come from a CloudWatch alarm publishing to an SNS topic in US East (N. Virginia). Two more services to configure per check, and a third bill line after ten alarms.
No status page
There is nothing to show customers. Teams that need one buy a separate status page product, which usually costs more than the checks.
No certificate check at all
AWS states that HTTPS health checks do not validate certificates, so they keep passing on an expired or invalid one. The $2.00 HTTPS option buys an encrypted request, not a certificate check.
A lot of requests
About one request every two seconds on average, per AWS. That is roughly 1.3 million requests a month per check hitting your origin, more with the fast interval.
The request volume is worth a second look if your origin is metered per invocation or per request, as serverless functions and some edge platforms are. It is also why the string matching option only reads the first 5,120 bytes: a full page on every check from every Region would add up fast. The alarm side is priced in detail in CloudWatch alarm pricing for downtime alerts, and if you are weighing AWS's other built-in option, CloudWatch Synthetics pricing covers canaries, which bill per run instead of per month.
When to keep Route 53 health checks, and when to move monitoring out
Keep them on Route 53 when
- The check drives DNS failover, weighted or latency routing. Nothing outside Route 53 can pull a record out of rotation for you.
- The endpoints are EC2 instances or load balancers in the same account, where the check is free or nearly so.
- You combine checks into calculated health checks for a failover decision.
Move the alerting checks out when
- The endpoints are outside AWS, so every check pays $0.75 plus $2.00 per option.
- You need content checks, SSL expiry warnings or domain expiry alerts, not only pass or fail.
- Customers expect a status page, and the team wants alerts in Slack or by SMS without wiring SNS.
- You want the monitor to keep working when the AWS account it lives in has a billing or permissions problem.
The common setup that works is both: Route 53 checks only on the records that fail over, with no optional features they do not need, and an outside monitor for everything a person should be told about. For a side-by-side of the other per-run and per-check meters, see synthetic monitoring pricing and Azure Application Insights pricing, the Microsoft equivalent, or the broader uptime monitoring pricing comparison.
Where these numbers come from, and what is deliberately not claimed
Check and option rates come from the AWS Price List offer file for Amazon Route 53, which lists the non-AWS check at $0.75, the non-AWS option at $2.00, the AWS check as free for the first 50 then $0.50, and the AWS option at $1.00 from the first check. The option names, the definition of an AWS endpoint and the free treatment of load balancer and S3 website checks come from the Route 53 pricing page. Request frequency, the 5,120 byte string limit, the three-Region minimum and the note that disabled checks are still billed come from the Route 53 developer guide. Alarm and notification rates come from the CloudWatch and SNS price lists for US East (N. Virginia). We do not assume whether checks on load balancers still bill their optional features, what SMS delivery costs for your numbers, or any private pricing you may have.
Route 53 health check pricing questions
How much do Route 53 health checks cost?
A basic Route 53 health check costs $0.75 a month for an endpoint outside AWS and $0.50 for an AWS endpoint in the same account, with the first 50 AWS-endpoint checks free. Every optional feature, such as HTTPS or string matching, adds $2.00 a month outside AWS and $1.00 inside it. Charges are prorated for partial months.
Are Route 53 health checks free?
Partly. Up to 50 basic health checks of AWS endpoints in, or linked to, your account are free, and checks of Elastic Load Balancing resources and S3 website endpoints are not billed. The optional features are not covered by that allowance, so 50 free HTTPS checks on EC2 instances still cost $50 a month in HTTPS fees.
What counts as an AWS endpoint for Route 53 health checks?
AWS defines it as a resource running inside AWS, such as an EC2 instance, that is provisioned in the same account as the health check or billed to the same account. A site on another host, a SaaS app, or an AWS resource owned by a different, unlinked account is billed at the higher non-AWS rate of $0.75 plus $2.00 per option.
Does HTTPS cost extra on a Route 53 health check?
Yes. HTTPS is one of the four optional features, so it adds $2.00 a month to a check on an outside endpoint and $1.00 on an AWS endpoint. For a modern site that only answers over TLS, that makes the practical entry price $2.75 a month per endpoint, not the $0.75 on the headline rate.
Do Route 53 HTTPS health checks validate SSL certificates?
No. The Route 53 developer guide states that HTTPS health checks do not validate SSL/TLS certificates, so a check keeps passing when a certificate is invalid or expired. You still pay the $2.00 HTTPS option for it. Visitors, meanwhile, see a browser warning, so certificate expiry needs its own monitor.
When does Route 53 mark an endpoint unhealthy?
When 18% of health checkers or fewer report it healthy. Each checker needs a TCP connection within four seconds and a 2xx or 3xx status within two seconds after that, plus the body within two more seconds when string matching is on. The low threshold stops one bad network path from failing over a healthy endpoint.
How often do Route 53 health checks run?
Every health checker sends a request every 30 seconds on the standard interval, or every 10 seconds on the fast interval, which is an optional feature. Because checkers in several Regions work independently, AWS says your endpoint receives a request about every two seconds on average at 30 seconds, and more than once per second at 10 seconds.
Do disabled Route 53 health checks still cost money?
Yes. The Route 53 developer guide states that charges for a health check still apply when the health check is disabled. Disabling only stops the checks and makes Route 53 treat the endpoint as healthy. To stop paying you have to delete the health check, and a deleted check cannot be restored with its settings.
How do I get alerts from a Route 53 health check?
Route 53 itself does not send alerts. You attach a CloudWatch alarm to the health check status metric, and the alarm publishes to an SNS topic in US East (N. Virginia) that emails or calls a webhook. The first 10 standard alarms are free, then $0.10 each a month, and the first 1,000 SNS emails a month are free.
Can Route 53 health checks monitor a private endpoint?
No. Route 53 health checkers run on the public internet and cannot reach local, private, non-routable or multicast addresses. For an internal service, AWS suggests a CloudWatch alarm on a metric the service publishes and a health check that watches that alarm, which is billed at the AWS-endpoint rate.
Are Route 53 health checks cheaper than an uptime monitoring tool?
For a few endpoints, yes. One outside HTTPS check with an alarm is $2.75 a month. From the 9th such endpoint, Route 53 costs more than UptimeHub Starter billed yearly ($24.75 against $24), and Starter covers 20 monitors with alerts and a branded status page. For checks on AWS endpoints inside the free 50, Route 53 stays cheaper for longer.
Do I still need Route 53 health checks if I use another uptime monitor?
Keep them where they drive DNS failover. A Route 53 health check can pull an unhealthy record out of rotation, which an outside monitor cannot do. What you can drop are the checks that exist only to email someone, and the HTTPS and string matching fees on them, because an uptime monitor already covers that with alerts and a status page.
HTTPS, alerts and a status page are not options here
UptimeHub checks your sites, APIs and ports from outside your cloud, every minute on Starter and every 30 seconds on Pro and above, confirms a failure from a second region before it alerts anyone, warns before SSL certificates and domains expire, and includes a branded status page on every plan. One price per monitor, with nothing added per feature.
Related breakdowns
CloudWatch alarm pricing
Standard, high resolution, composite and anomaly alarms, and what alerting on downtime costs in AWS.
CloudWatch Synthetics pricing
Canaries at $0.0012 a run, and why the interval sets the bill.
Azure Application Insights pricing
Availability tests per execution, and what five locations do to the bill.