AWS Secrets Manager pricing model
Secrets Manager charges two ways at once: a flat per-secret-month fee plus a per-API-call fee. Understanding the split is what lets you predict the bill and decide whether to cache.
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Most AWS services charge along a single axis — storage by the GB-month, or compute by the hour. Secrets Manager charges along two independent axes simultaneously, and the second one is where surprise bills come from.
Secrets Manager pricing
A flat per-secret-month fee for storage, plus a per-call fee for every API access — both billed at the same time.
Storage cost grows with the number of secrets. API cost grows with how often each one is read. A rarely-read secret costs almost nothing in API fees but still incurs the monthly storage charge. A constantly-polled secret with no caching can cost more in API fees than in storage.
The two rates
| Axis | Rate |
|---|---|
| Per secret-month | $0.40 per secret |
| Per API call | $0.05 per 10,000 calls |
Both rates accrue independently. There is no free tier on a per-secret basis after the initial 30-day trial.
Worked example: when API fees beat storage fees
Imagine a service with 50 secrets. The storage bill is fixed regardless of usage:
- Storage = 50 secrets × $0.40 = $20.00 / month
Now suppose every pod re-reads its secrets on every request, with no caching. At 100 requests/second, that’s roughly 260 million API calls per month per secret. The API bill explodes:
- API calls = 260,000,000 × $0.05 / 10,000 = $1,300 / month / secret
For a 50-secret service that’s $65,000/month in API fees against $20 in storage — three orders of magnitude apart, all because nobody cached the secret in memory.
The mental model: storage is the floor, API is the ceiling
The per-secret-month fee is what you pay for existing. The per-call fee is what you pay for using it badly. A well-architected service with N secrets and a sensible cache costs roughly N × $0.40 / month plus a rounding error in API fees. A poorly-architected one with the same N secrets but no cache can cost arbitrarily more.
This is also the reason consolidating multiple values into one JSON-blob secret is sometimes worth it: one secret with five fields costs $0.40/month; five secrets with one field each cost $2.00/month. The trade-off is rotation granularity — rotating the JSON blob rotates everything inside it.