Free Tool
Athena Query Cost Estimator
AWS Athena charges $5 per terabyte scanned, with a 10MB minimum per query. See exactly what your queries cost — and what they'd cost with proper optimisation applied.
Based on real-world data from a $47,000 Athena bill investigation. Read the case study →
Your Query
Find this in Athena → Query history → Data scanned
A dashboard refreshing every minute = 1,440/day
How it's calculated
Athena price: $5.00 per TB scanned (us-east-1 standard rate)
Minimum: 10MB charged per query
Parquet: ~87% less data scanned vs JSON/CSV
Partitioning: ~92% reduction with proper WHERE clauses
Both combined: ~97% less data scanned
Important — estimates only
The Athena price ($5/TB) and 10MB minimum are official AWS figures confirmed at time of publication. Always verify current rates at aws.amazon.com/athena/pricing as pricing may vary by region or change over time.
The optimisation reduction percentages (Parquet, partitioning) are indicative estimates based on real-world query analysis. AWS states a range of 30–90% savings depending on schema width, number of columns referenced, partition key alignment, and data distribution. Your actual savings will vary.
This tool is for planning and awareness purposes only. Do not use these figures for financial commitments, invoicing, or billing disputes. Always validate against your actual Athena query history in the AWS console.
Enter your query's data scanned above to see the cost breakdown.
Why Athena costs spiral without you noticing
Raw format scanning
JSON and CSV are row-oriented. Athena reads every field on every record, even if your query only needs three columns out of fifty. A 380MB scan per query on 52-column JSON is mostly wasted reads.
No partition pruning
Without partitions, every query scans your entire dataset history. A dashboard asking for the last hour's data still reads all 9.6TB of historical records to find it.
Dashboard refresh rates
A single poorly-structured query running once is a nuisance. The same query running every minute across six dashboards is $47,000 a month. Frequency multiplies everything.