AWS Trusted Advisor Pricing and What Business Support+ Costs for the Full Cost Checks

AWS Trusted Advisor has no price of its own. Every AWS account gets 56 checks for free under Basic Support (all Service Limits checks plus selected Security and Fault Tolerance checks), and none of them is a cost optimization check. The full set of 482 checks, including every cost check, the Trusted Advisor API and automatic refresh, comes with a paid support plan. The cheapest is Business Support+, which costs the greater of $29 a month per account or a sliding 9 to 3 percent of that account's monthly AWS charges. Enterprise Support starts at $5,000 a month.

That makes "how much does Trusted Advisor cost" a question about support plans, and the answer depends on your bill, your account structure and, oddly, on the month you buy Savings Plans. This guide uses the figures on AWS's own pricing and documentation pages, read on 1 October 2026, works through what the fee looks like at real spend levels, and compares it with getting the same cost findings another way.

How much does AWS Trusted Advisor cost?

Trusted Advisor costs nothing extra on top of your support plan, and the plan decides how many checks you see. On Basic Support it is free with 56 checks and no cost checks. To unlock all 482 checks you need Business Support+, Enterprise Support or Unified Operations, priced as follows on AWS's support pricing page.

Two details on that page change the arithmetic more than the percentages do. Business Support+ fees "are calculated on a per-account basis", while Enterprise and Unified Operations are billed on the aggregate charges of all subscribed accounts. And the fee is calculated on gross AWS charges, "before any discounts or credits are applied". AWS Marketplace purchases, Professional Services, training and a short list of other services are excluded from the calculation.

Is AWS Trusted Advisor free?

Partly. The Trusted Advisor console is free on every account, but the free tier is a safety tool rather than a cost tool. Basic Support shows all Service Limits checks and selected Security and Fault Tolerance checks, and AWS's documentation notes that automatic check updates are not available on Basic, so Security checks have to be refreshed manually. If you opened Trusted Advisor to find idle instances or unused Elastic IPs and saw nothing, that is why: the cost optimization category is locked until you pay for support.

What the support fee comes to at real spend levels

AWS gives one worked example: an account with $20,000 of monthly charges pays $900 on the first $10,000 and $700 on the next $10,000, so $1,600 a month on Business Support+. Here is the same tiered calculation at other levels, for a single account and for an Enterprise Support organization.

Read the Enterprise column carefully. Business Support+ is cheaper at every level in this table, but the gap is smaller than the minimums suggest: at $50,000 a month it is $1,300 ($3,700 against $5,000), and for that difference Enterprise adds a designated technical account manager and 15-minute response times. AWS cut that minimum from $15,000 to $5,000 when it reorganized its plans, which is why older pricing articles overstate it.

The per-account rule and many small accounts

Because Business Support+ is calculated per account, the $29 minimum applies to each account you enroll. Forty sandbox accounts that each spend $50 a month cost $1,160 a month in support before anyone opens a ticket. Larger accounts are affected too. Each account starts again at the 9 percent band, so ten accounts spending $10,000 each pay $900 apiece, $9,000 a month in total, while one account spending $100,000 pays $6,800. If you run a multi-account AWS Organization, model the fee per account, and enroll only the accounts where you actually need the checks or the support.

Buying a Savings Plan raises the support bill that month

This is the line on the pricing page that surprises finance teams. When you are on a paid plan and prepay for Savings Plans or Reserved Instances, "the upfront charges for each reserved resource are included in the calculation of your AWS Support fees in the month you purchase the resources". Take an account spending $50,000 a month that buys a $300,000 all-upfront Savings Plan. That month its charges are $350,000 and the Business Support+ fee goes from $3,700 to $17,300, an extra $13,600 caused by the commitment purchase alone. Partial-upfront or no-upfront terms spread the same effect over the term, so the payment option you choose changes the support cost. Put the support fee into the business case for any large commitment. If a vendor buys commitments for you, as the ones on our ProsperOps pricing page do, ask whether its savings figure accounts for it.

What you get for the money on the cost side

Once a paid plan is active, the Cost Optimization category lights up with checks such as low utilization Amazon EC2 instances, idle load balancers, underutilized Amazon EBS volumes, unassociated Elastic IP addresses, idle Amazon RDS DB instances, and Savings Plan and Reserved Instance recommendations. Some checks are powered by AWS Compute Optimizer, which you opt into separately. On Enterprise Support and Unified Operations, Trusted Advisor Priority adds recommendations that your account team ranks for you.

The checks are per account and AWS-only. They report what an account looks like today, they do not split cost by team or product, and they know nothing about Azure, Google Cloud or the SaaS subscriptions on the company card. Trusted Advisor's Security checks are a useful input for audit evidence too, but they are not a control register; mapping findings to the controls an auditor tests is a job for compliance management software.

Is Business Support+ worth it just for Trusted Advisor?

Rarely, if cost checks are the only reason. Business Support+ is priced as a support contract, with 24/7 access to engineers, 30-minute response for critical issues and AI-assisted troubleshooting, and for a production workload those are usually reason enough on their own. If you already pay for it, use the cost checks; they are free at that point. If you are considering it only to find waste, compare the fee with the alternatives below first, because at $50,000 a month of spend you would pay $44,400 a year for checks that largely duplicate free AWS services.

For a broader comparison, including tools that act on the findings, see the AWS cloud cost management tools roundup, and our AWS Cost Explorer alternatives page covers what the native consoles leave out.

Which AWS Support plans are being discontinued?

AWS is retiring three plans on 1 January 2027. Developer Support and Business Support end on that date, and existing customers can keep them until then or move to Business Support+ at any time. Enterprise On-Ramp also ends, and AWS is upgrading those customers to Enterprise Support at renewal or in batches through 2026, with an email a month before. Developer Support, Business Support and Enterprise On-Ramp stay available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. If your budget still carries a Business Support line at the old rates, re-cost it on the Business Support+ schedule above for 2027.

How AWS bills and refunds support

Every plan is billed monthly with no long-term contract. You pay for at least one month each time you sign up, or 90 days for Unified Operations, and cancelling mid-month after that minimum gets a prorated refund for the rest of the month. That makes Business Support+ easy to trial: enroll one representative account for a month, export the cost optimization findings, and decide on evidence. AWS also advertises Business Support+ as a limited-time offer with a full refund for the first two months of usage, so check whether that offer still applies when you sign up.

Getting the cost findings without paying 3 to 9 percent of the bill

Most of the money Trusted Advisor's cost checks find sits in a handful of places: instances sized for a launch that never came, volumes left behind by deleted instances, idle databases in old environments and commitments that no longer match usage. You can see all of that in your billing data without a support contract. CostAnalyst reads the AWS Cost and Usage Report you upload, alongside Azure and Google Cloud exports and the SaaS subscriptions you list, and shows each saving in dollars with the line items behind it, split by account and owner, with an email alert when spend jumps. Plans are on the pricing page from $59 a month billed yearly, and a one-time demo on your own billing export shows the findings before you pay. If you then decide you also need AWS's engineers, buy Business Support+ for the accounts that run production and keep the rest on Basic.

The short version

• Trusted Advisor is free with 56 checks on Basic Support, and none of them is a cost check.
• All 482 checks need Business Support+ (greater of $29 per account or 9% to 3% of that account's charges), Enterprise Support (from $5,000 a month) or Unified Operations (from $50,000 a month).
• Fees are calculated on gross charges before discounts, per account on Business Support+, and include Savings Plan and Reserved Instance upfront payments in the month you buy them.
• Developer Support, Business Support and Enterprise On-Ramp end on 1 January 2027 outside GovCloud.
• If waste is the only reason to upgrade, Compute Optimizer and Cost Optimization Hub cost nothing, and a cost tool that reads the billing export costs far less than a percentage of the bill.