AWS Glue Cost Calculator: Estimate Your DPU & Job Bill
Free AWS Glue cost calculator: estimate your monthly Glue bill from DPUs, worker type, job duration and run frequency, including crawlers and the Data Catalog. Compare Standard vs Flex pricing and see what right-sizing saves.
For data engineers and platform owners sizing or trimming an AWS Glue bill.
Your Glue job
10 DPU allocated (10 × 1)
Crawlers & Data Catalog
Crawlers bill at the $0.44/DPU-hr rate (10-min minimum). The Data Catalog is free up to 1,000,000 objects and requests per month.
Estimated bill
$48.40
/ month
Per year
$580.80
at this usage
Switch jobs to Flex
$15.00
/mo if timing can slip
Where the cost goes
| Glue jobs | Standard · 10 DPU | $44.00 |
| Crawlers | 30 runs/mo | $4.40 |
| Data Catalog | within free tier | $0.00 |
| Total | per month | $48.40 |
| Jobs on Standard vs Flex | comparison | $44.00 / $29.00 |
This is an estimate. Want the bill actually cut?
The calculator shows where the money goes. The fixes that take 50%+ off it are partition pruning, right-sizing, Flex, and killing full-scan reprocessing. The guide walks through each one, and I do this work for teams whose data-platform spend is climbing faster than their data.
How AWS Glue pricing works
AWS Glue is serverless, so there is no cluster to size, but you still pay for compute by the DPU-hour. One DPU is 4 vCPU and 16 GB of RAM. An ETL job bills at $0.44 per DPU-hour on the Standard execution class, metered per second with a one-minute minimum per run, so the figure that drives your bill is simply DPUs × hours × rate. This AWS Glue cost calculator works that out for your own jobs, then adds the two line items most estimates forget: crawlers and the Data Catalog.
Jobs, crawlers and the Data Catalog
Three things show up on a Glue bill, and the calculator covers all three:
- ETL jobs. Workers × DPUs-per-worker gives the DPUs a run allocates. The default Spark job is handed 10 workers whether it needs them or not, which is where most bill shock starts.
- Crawlers. They bill at the same $0.44/DPU-hour rate with a ten-minute minimum per crawl, so running them hourly against slow-changing schemas quietly adds up.
- Data Catalog. Free up to one million stored objects and one million requests a month, then $1 per 100,000 objects and $1 per million requests above that. Most teams stay inside the free tier.
Standard vs Flex, and what right-sizing saves
For any job whose start time can slip, like nightly batch or backfills, the Flex execution class runs on spare capacity at $0.29/DPU-hour instead of $0.44, about 34% cheaper. Toggle the execution class to see the difference instantly, and watch the right-sizing hint: drop a job below the default 10 workers and the calculator shows what that single change claws back.
How to actually cut your Glue bill
Estimating the bill is the easy part; cutting it comes down to a short, ordered list of fixes: prune the scan with partition filters and Parquet, right-size workers, move eligible jobs to Flex, and stop reprocessing history. The deep dive walks through each lever and the order that captures the most savings: AWS Glue cost optimization: why your bill exploded and how to cut it. If your data-platform spend is climbing faster than your data, tell me about your setup and I will take a look.
Frequently asked questions
How is AWS Glue priced?
Glue ETL jobs bill by the DPU-hour: $0.44 on the Standard execution class and $0.29 on Flex, metered per second with a one-minute minimum per run. One DPU is 4 vCPU and 16 GB of RAM. Crawlers bill at the same $0.44/DPU-hour rate with a ten-minute minimum, and the Data Catalog is free up to one million stored objects and one million requests per month.
How much does an AWS Glue job cost?
Cost per run is DPUs × hours × rate. A job on 10 G.1X workers (10 DPU) running 20 minutes on Standard is 10 × (20 ÷ 60) × $0.44 ≈ $1.47 per run, so 30 runs a month is about $44. Lower the worker count or move it to Flex and that figure drops accordingly. The calculator does the maths for your own numbers.
Is AWS Glue Flex cheaper, and when should I use it?
Flex runs on spare capacity at $0.29/DPU-hour instead of $0.44, about 34% cheaper, in exchange for a start time that can drift. Use it for time-insensitive work like nightly batch or backfills, and avoid it for jobs with strict SLAs.
How do I reduce my AWS Glue costs?
Right-size the worker count instead of leaving the default 10, move time-insensitive jobs to Flex, and above all scan less data with partition pruning and Parquet so each run reads only what it needs. The AWS Glue cost optimization guide walks through each lever and the order to apply them.