You can adopt these independently — Runtime without Memory, Gateway without Runtime.
Prices verified 2026-08-04 against the
AWS pricing page.
AgentCore Runtime
Serverless execution with per-session isolation
Runs your agent as a managed, serverless workload. Each session gets its own isolated microVM, and you are billed for CPU only while the agent is actually computing — not while it waits on a model response or an HTTP call.
Agents spend most of their wall-clock time waiting. Billing CPU on active use rather than session duration is the difference between paying for thinking and paying for waiting, and it is the single biggest reason Runtime is cheaper than holding a container open.
- per vCPU-hour
- $0.089
- per GB-hour
- $0.009
AgentCore Gateway
Turns APIs and Lambdas into MCP tools
Exposes existing REST APIs, Lambda functions and third-party services to your agent as Model Context Protocol tools, with a semantic search index so the agent finds the right tool instead of being handed all of them.
Tool descriptions live in the prompt, so every unused tool is tokens you pay for on every single step. Semantic tool selection keeps that prefix small, which compounds hard in a loop.
- per 1,000 API invocations
- $0.005
- per 1,000 search queries
- $0.025
- per 100 tools indexed / month
- $0.020
AgentCore Memory
Short-term and long-term recall
Managed conversation state. Short-term memory holds the working session; long-term memory extracts durable facts and retrieves them into later sessions.
Priced per event and per record, not per token — so unlike stuffing history into the prompt, cost does not scale with how long the conversation gets.
- per 1,000 new short-term events
- $0.250
- per 1,000 long-term records stored / month
- $0.750
- per 1,000 long-term retrievals
- $0.500
AgentCore Identity
OAuth and credentials on the agent's behalf
Brokers tokens so an agent can act against Google, Slack, GitHub or your own OAuth provider as a specific user, without the credentials passing through your prompt or your code.
Free when the agent reaches tools through Runtime or Gateway. Route authentication that way and this line disappears from the bill entirely.
- per 1,000 token or API-key requests
- $0.010
No charge when used through AgentCore Runtime or Gateway.
Built-in Tools
Browser and Code Interpreter
A managed headless browser for agents that operate real web UIs, and a sandboxed code interpreter for agents that need to compute rather than estimate.
Both bill on the same vCPU/GB-hour meter as Runtime, so a browser session left open costs the same as an agent left thinking. Close them.
- per vCPU-hour
- $0.089
- per GB-hour
- $0.009
Policy in AgentCore
Rules on what the agent may do
Natural-language and structured authorization rules evaluated before an agent takes an action, so 'never issue a refund over €500 without approval' is enforced outside the model rather than asked of it.
The token component is billed separately from your model spend, and at $0.13 per 1,000 input tokens it is well above most model rates — keep policy prompts short.
- per authorization request
- $0.000025
- per 1,000 input tokens
- $0.130
AgentCore Evaluations
Scoring agent trajectories
Judges whether an agent actually did the right thing across a whole multi-step trajectory, rather than whether one response looked plausible.
The failure mode of agents is a sequence that goes wrong in step four, which single-response evaluation cannot see.
- per 1,000 built-in input tokens
- $0.002
- per 1,000 built-in output tokens
- $0.012
- per 1,000 custom evaluations
- $1.50
AgentCore Observability
Traces of every step
OpenTelemetry-compatible traces of the agent's reasoning, tool calls and token usage, surfaced in CloudWatch.
Billed at CloudWatch rates rather than a separate AgentCore meter — the cost lands on a different line of your bill than the rest of this table.
Charged at standard CloudWatch rates; there is no separate AgentCore price.
Web Search
Managed search for agents
A first-party search tool an agent can call without you contracting a third-party search API.
At $7 per 1,000 queries this is the most expensive per-call item in AgentCore by a wide margin. An agent that searches on every step will make search, not tokens, the largest line on the bill.
- per 1,000 queries
- $7.00