Is it free to transfer data into an Amazon AWS EC2 instance?

Question

I can't find a good price overview for the costs of transferring data into Amazon EC2 nodes. According to the price calculator linked below it is apparently free of charge to transfer any amount of data into an Amazon EC2 node. Please let me know if this is true.

http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

Note: I am aware that of course using the EC2 instance is not free of charge, but Amazon will usually bill you for data transfer separately - that's what I am asking about.

Answer 1

As of this writing (April 13 2016), it is free to transfer data into EC2 from outside the Amazon cloud and from a different AWS region. However, certain transfers within the Amazon cloud will incur a $0.01 fee per GB. Specifically, transfers from

Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift and Amazon ElastiCache instances or Elastic Network Interfaces

that are either

in the same Availability Zone [..] using a public or Elastic IP address

or

in another Availability Zone or peered VPC in the same AWS Region

incur a fee of $0.01 per gb.

I quickly checked this for all AWS regions, it appears to be the same. However, the pricing may change in the future. For the most current pricing, it is best to look at the "Data Transfer In" section of this EC2 pricing page page, which is where I got that information from.

Disclaimer: If you're actually going to rely on this information, make sure you read their pricing literature yourself and verify that what I said is correct.