In contrast to the previously charged flat rate, the cloud service provider is introducing new tiered pricing to lower costs for high-volume enterprise users. Credit: Michael Vi / Shutterstock AWS has changed the pricing of CloudWatch logs inside its serverless compute service Lambda to introduce tiered pricing that can lower costs for high-volume enterprise users. “On May 1st, 2025, AWS announced changes to Lambda logging, which can reduce Lambda CloudWatch logging costs and make it easier and more cost-effective to use a wider range of monitoring tools,” the company wrote in a blog post. CloudWatch is an AWS service that allows enterprise developers to monitor, store, and access their log files from different AWS compute, networking, and storage services. In Lambda’s case, logs generated from a Lambda instance, which are ingested by CloudWatch, can provide data and insights to developers to help them understand performance issues and potential failures of serverless applications and carry out actions such as troubleshooting and debugging. “It becomes even more important for serverless applications built using Lambda because of the ephemeral and stateless nature of the Lambda execution environment,” the company wrote. AWS offers three classes of logs under CloudWatch logs — Standard, Infrequent Access, and CloudWatch Logs Live Tail. As part of the pricing change, AWS has renamed the Standard log class to Vended logs, and in contrast to the previously charged flat rate for this class, a new tiered pricing plan, based on volume, has been introduced. Earlier, enterprises needed to pay a flat fee of $0.50 per GB for Standard logs ingestion on CloudWatch logs. However, with the new volume-based tiered plan, enterprises will pay $0.50 per GB for the first 10 TB per month, $0.25 per GB for the next 20TB per month, $0.10 per GB for the next 20 TB per month, and $0.05 per GB for the next 50 TB per month. “The pricing tiers scale with your logging volume, ensuring that cost benefits increase as your application grows. This allows you to maintain comprehensive logging practices that previously may have been cost-prohibitive,” AWS wrote. The update also saw AWS change the pricing of the Infrequent Access log class, which is nearly 50% cheaper than the Standard log class. In contrast to the flat fee of $0.25 per GB, enterprises will now pay $0.25 per GB for the first 10 TB per month, $0.15 per GB for the next 20TB per month, $0.075 per GB for the next 20 TB per month, and $0.05 per GB for the next 50 TB per month. CloudWatch Logs Live Tail, which is an interactive, real-time log streaming and analytics capability, has undergone no pricing changes. New places to store Lambda logs In addition to changing the pricing of logs for Lambda, developers can also now store logs generated from their Lambda instances inside Amazon S3 and Amazon Data Firehose. Both destinations also include a volume-based tiered pricing that is identical. Enterprises have to pay $0.25 per GB for the first 10 TB per month, $0.15 per GB for the next 20TB per month, $0.075 per GB for the next 20 TB per month, and $0.05 per GB for the next 50 TB per month for both storage destinations. AWS expects that the support for logs in Firehose will help enterprises streamline the delivery of Lambda log to additional destinations such as Amazon OpenSearch Service, HTTP endpoints, and third-party observability providers, such as Splunk, Sumo Logic, and New Relic. Earlier this week, the cloud service provider added support for additional cost metrics and filtering capabilities to its finance management tool, Budgets, which is designed to help enterprises keep track of their expenditure by setting custom usage thresholds on various services individually or for the entire enterprise. Just days earlier, AWS updated the Data Automation capability inside its generative AI service Amazon Bedrock to further support the automation of generating insights from unstructured data and bring down the development time required for building applications underpinned by large language models (LLMs).