Direct Connect Flat-rate pricing

AWS Direct Connect now offers flat-rate pricing — a simplified, predictable billing model for dedicated connections. With flat-rate pricing, you pay a fixed hourly rate for your connection based on bandwidth and pricing tier, with no per-gigabyte data transfer out (DTO) charges. A pricing tier is group of data transfer paths Flat-rate pricing is available alongside the existing pay-as-you-go model, giving you the flexibility to choose the billing approach that best fits your workload. Flat-rate connections are billed in one-hour increments, rounded up to the nearest hour. There are no per-gigabyte data transfer out charges for Regions included in your selected pricing tier. Direct Connect port-hour charges apply based on your selected bandwidth.that share similar geographic distance. 

AWS Direct Connect flat-rate pricing introduces the concept of port-pairs. A port-pair builds provides you a resilient architecture without have to design it yourself. A port-pair is two dedicated Direct Connect ports, provisioned on different devices or locations and the same pricing tier. One port carries your traffic and the other stands by for redundancy, so if one port becomes unavailable — for example, during an outage or a maintenance window — your connection stays up through the redundant port. The usable capacity purchased is defined by the capacity of a single port, the second port in a port-pair exists solely for redundancy. For example, a 10 Gbps port-pair at any Direct Connect location gives you an effective usable capacity of 10 Gbps, not 20 Gbps. The redundant port protects your connection; it does not double your throughput.

Existing individual connections provisioned on different devices can be paired into a qualifying port-pair by adding them to a Resiliency Group. To learn more about Resiliency Groups, refer to user guide.

If you do not want a port-pair, you can create individual connections instead, assign each one the flat-rate billing mode and a pricing tier, and leave them out of a Resiliency Group. This allows you to deploy two full-bandwidth connections independently. These connections are billed at the same flat rate cost for their tier, but do not include the built-in redundancy of a port-pair.

When you create a Direct Connect connection, you choose:

1. Location — The DX location where your connection is provisioned.
2. Bandwidth — The port speed for your connection.
3. Billing mode — Either pay-as-you-go or flat-rate.

If you select flat-rate, you also need to choose a pricing tier that determines which AWS Regions are covered at no additional data transfer cost from that DX location.

A Direct Connect connection can connect to resources that span multiple AWS Regions using Direct Connect Gateways (DXGWs) and AWS Cloud WAN. Because these resources can route traffic to more than one AWS Region, attaching them to a flat-rate connection may result in traffic flowing to Regions not covered by your selected pricing tier. Hence, when you attach a multi-Region resource to your connection, review your pricing tier to confirm it includes all AWS Regions that you wish to cover under flat-rate pricing. If traffic is routed to a Region outside your pricing tier, that usage is billed at standard Direct Connect data transfer rates.

Flat-rate pricing covers private and public traffic. Transit and AWS SiteLink traffic are not covered by any pricing tier and are billed at standard rates.