Amazon Connect Pricing 2026: Rates, Add-Ons & Monthly Total

Amazon Connect pricing starts at $0.038 per voice minute on Amazon Connect Customer and $0.018 per minute on Customer Basic. Chat, messaging, and email are priced per message or email. AWS lists no minimums or contracts, and the total depends on your usage.

I read AWS's pricing page, appendix, and telephony tables line by line. Connect Customer costs less per voice minute once you add agent assistance, which AWS only offers on Basic alongside conversational analytics. Basic costs less with analytics alone or neither.

Telephony and phone numbers cost extra on both plans, which is why the sections below price the pieces AWS publishes and total 50 agents.

TL;DR: Amazon Connect Pricing in 2026

• Connect Customer ($0.038 per voice minute) includes analytics, agent assistance, and scheduling in the channel rate.

• Customer Basic ($0.018 per voice minute) has lower channel rates and fewer AI features. New instances begin on Connect Customer, and AWS documents switching to Basic, with a caveat about runtime errors covered below.

• Clinics that need ambient note drafting pay $99 per user per month for Amazon Connect Health.

• Telephony is a separate cost. A US local (DID) number is $0.0300 per day, and inbound calls to a local DID number add $0.0022 per minute.

Amazon Connect Pricing Plans in 2026, Summarized

Amazon Connect Health is a separate healthcare product with its own pricing, apart from the two contact center plans. That's why each row uses its own unit, with channels billed by usage, ambient documentation per user per month, and patient verification per action.

I checked these prices against AWS's pricing page and appendix on October 11, 2026. Rates are in USD, and the page doesn't say which region they apply to, although it notes that pricing may vary by region, communication type, and third-party provider.

The telephony figures in this guide come from the appendix's US East (N. Virginia) table, and AWS's own call examples use US West (Oregon). Confirm them with AWS before relying on them.

Channel rates have no monthly seat fee, though Basic charges per agent for forecasting and evaluations. Voice service is billed per second after a 10-second minimum, and telephony per second after a 60-second minimum, as the telephony section explains.

The appendix’s Free Tier section gives you 1,000 profiles per month with Customer Profiles and 500 chat messages per month with conversational analytics.

Free trials start on first use or activation, with 100,000 voice call minutes per month for 2 months on conversational analytics, 30 days of performance evaluations, and 90 days of forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling. After a trial ends, standard rates apply.

Amazon Connect Pricing Plans Breakdown

The channel rate decides which features are included. Connect Customer includes the AI and scheduling tools, while Customer Basic prices each one separately or leaves it out.

Amazon Connect Customer at $0.038 Per Voice Minute

Voice is $0.038 per voice minute, chat is $0.010 per message, and messaging and email are $0.014 per message and $0.080 per email.

Conversational analytics and post-contact summaries, end-customer self-service, real-time agent assistance, performance evaluations of agents, and testing and simulating channel interactions are included at those rates.

Forecasting and agent scheduling, plus screen recording, cover voice, chat, and messaging, but not email. Amazon Lex requests that start in your Connect Customer instance are covered by the channel rate too, so self-service has no separate Lex line.

Best for: Contact centers that use agent assistance on voice, which on Basic also requires analytics.

Pros:

✅ Analytics, agent assistance, and screen recording are included, while Basic charges for all three per minute.

✅ Forecasting and evaluations have no per-agent fee, while Basic charges $27 and $12 per agent per month.

✅ Outbound voice campaigns are $0.045 per minute, and the appendix lists no call-attempt or profile charges.

Cons:

❌ Voice is more than double Basic's rate, at $0.038 per minute versus $0.018.

❌ Tasks are $0.070 each, versus $0.04 on Basic.

Customer Basic at $0.018 Per Minute

Basic includes channel usage only. Voice is $0.018 per minute, chat $0.004 per message, messaging $0.010 per message, and email $0.050 per email. Tasks are $0.04 each.

Basic prices the AI and scheduling features as separate lines. Conversational analytics is $0.015 per voice minute for the first 5 million minutes each month and $0.0125 after that, plus $0.0015 per message on chat and messaging.

Real-time agent assistance adds $0.0080 per voice minute but requires conversational analytics on voice, so the pair adds $0.023 per minute. Screen recording adds $0.006 per minute.

The two per-agent features are forecasting and agent scheduling at $27, and performance evaluations of agents at $12, both per agent per month.

AWS says Basic doesn’t include features such as conversational analytics for email, flow designer analytics, performance evaluations of self-service interactions, estimated wait time, and customer-first callbacks.

New instances are Connect Customer instances, according to AWS's docs, and switching an instance to Basic can trigger runtime errors in flows that use Connect Customer features.

Best for: Voice and chat operations that use analytics without agent assistance, or neither.

Pros:

✅ Every channel rate is lower. Basic's voice rate is $0.018, chat $0.004, messaging $0.010, and email $0.050, versus $0.038, $0.010, $0.014, and $0.080 on Connect Customer.

✅ Tasks are $0.04, which is about 43% less than the $0.070 on Connect Customer.

Cons:

❌ Each feature has its own charge. For 50 agents, forecasting adds $1,350 a month and evaluations $600, before any per-minute analytics.

❌ On Basic, the appendix bills Amazon Lex usage separately, listed as "plus Lex" on the self-service row, so self-service costs more than the channel rate suggests.

❌ Outbound campaigns cost more on Basic in AWS's own examples, at $172.11 versus $120.31 for voice, $188.30 versus $138.30 for SMS, and $71.00 versus $21.00 for email.

Basic’s campaign minute is cheaper, at $0.025 versus $0.045, but it adds $0.005 per call attempt and $0.005 per profile utilized daily, and those fees outweigh the lower rate.

Telephony and Phone Numbers at $0.0300 Per Day for a US DID

Telephony is an extra charge on both plans. AWS's appendix describes voice as two charges, one for the voice service and one for the communication service.

Every voice minute carries that second charge for communication, which is telephony on phone calls or $0.010 per minute for in-app and web calling audio usage.

Video connection adds $0.015 per minute per participant, and screen sharing usage adds $0.015 per minute when used.

Calls are charged per second with a 60-second minimum. Country rates depend on the AWS Region where you create the instance, according to AWS's cost optimization docs.

A toll-free number is about 5.5 times as expensive per inbound minute as a DID.

AWS's outbound campaign sample is one exception to that toll-free cost, since it treats a US toll-free number as free for the first 12 months, then $0.06 per day.

To see how the pieces combine, AWS prices one sample call at $0.456 on Connect Customer, with 3 minutes in queue, 2 minutes with an agent, and a 5-minute outbound transfer, before taxes and fees.

Amazon Connect Health at $99 Per User Per Month for Ambient Documentation

Ambient documentation drafts clinical notes from the clinician-patient conversation for $99 per user per month, up to 600 encounters per user. Beyond 600, AWS charges $0.036 per minute, per its Health pricing page.

Patient verification is priced per action, meaning one end-to-end patient conversation from activation to close. Each action is $0.15.

The Health FAQ gives US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) as the available regions. Patient verification and ambient documentation are generally available, and appointment management, patient insights, and medical coding are in Preview.

Best for: Clinics that pay per user for ambient documentation and teams that pay per action for patient verification.

Pros:

✅ The 600-encounter cap is 2 to 3 times the 200 to 300 encounters AWS says a primary care physician handles in a month.

✅ Ambient documentation has a 60-day trial per user, and patient verification gets 30,000 actions over 30 days.

Cons:

❌ Appointment management, patient insights, and medical coding show no rate on the pricing page, and the FAQ lists all three as Preview.

What Amazon Connect Pricing Leaves Out of the Channel Rate

Outbound campaigns. Voice campaigns are $0.045 per minute on Connect Customer, replacing the $0.038 voice rate. SMS and WhatsApp delivery is charged through Amazon End User Messaging, and email delivery through Amazon SES.

Storage. Recordings and transcripts are stored in Amazon S3 under your lifecycle policy, so storage shows up on your AWS bill. Neither Connect pricing page lists an S3 rate.

To cut that cost, AWS's example moves anything older than three months to Glacier archive storage, according to its cost optimization docs.

Services around AI agents. Agents that use Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway or Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases pay those services' charges as well, and third-party speech-to-text and text-to-speech models are charged at the provider's rates.

On the contact itself, a third-party AI agent that joins adds $0.001 per text message or $0.01 per minute of voice.

Cases, profiles, and Live Sync. Cases are $0.12 per case created, and Customer Profiles that hold imported data are $0.005 per profile utilized daily.

Live Sync adds $0.01 per minute to the channel rate and is on a free trial through November 30, 2026.

External voice. Connecting another voice system for analytics adds $0.032 per minute plus $100 per connector per day on Connect Customer.

Retired and renamed features. Voice ID support ended on May 20, 2026, yet the appendix still lists $0.025 per transaction.

Amazon Q in Connect has no price of its own because AWS now describes it as one of its AI agents, and one appendix entry also still uses the label Contact Lens with external voice.

Because each of these sits outside the channel rate, ask AWS for one quote that shows every separate charge. In the 50-agent example below, Basic's add-ons alone come to $3,520 a month.

Why Amazon Connect Prices Differ Across Sites

AWS renamed its original product Amazon Connect Customer on April 28, 2026, and three guides still list rates that differ from AWS's current pages, some under the old plan names, Individual features and Unlimited AI.

Check the date on any pricing guide against that April 28 rename.

Which Amazon Connect Plan Should You Choose?

Before you pick a plan, count the capabilities you’ll use. Agent assistance on voice makes Connect Customer cheaper, because Basic requires analytics with it, as the next section shows.

Connect Customer costs less when you:

• Run agent assistance on your voice calls, which on Basic also requires analytics

• Send outbound campaigns, which come out lower on Connect Customer in the pricing examples

• Want scheduling and agent evaluations without a per-agent fee

Customer Basic saves money when you:

• Handle voice and chat without analytics

• Use conversational analytics without agent assistance

Amazon Connect Health applies when you:

• Run clinics with providers who document 600 encounters a month or fewer

• Need patient identity checks, priced per action

Is Amazon Connect Worth the Cost?

Amazon Connect is worth the cost when you run both analytics and agent assistance on voice, or your volume varies from month to month. It's less suitable when you need a fixed seat price or depend on Voice ID.

Connect Customer charges $0.020 more per voice minute than Basic, while Basic's analytics add $0.015 and agent assistance $0.0080 per minute.

Basic with analytics alone comes to $0.033 per voice minute, below Connect Customer's $0.038. Add agent assistance, which AWS requires analytics for on voice, and Basic reaches $0.041, before the $27 and $12 per-agent fees.

In my view, Connect Customer makes more sense once a team runs agent assistance on voice. Basic stays cheaper with analytics alone or neither, unless the per-agent charges for forecasting and evaluations push it back above Connect Customer.

The 50-agent example below shows how fast that happens, with forecasting alone adding $1,350 a month to Basic.

Monthly Cost for a 50-Agent Contact Center

This illustrative example uses 50 agents, 60,000 inbound voice minutes on one US DID number over a 30-day month, 20,000 chat messages, 5,000 inbound emails, and 10,000 SMS messages, at the US East rates above.

In the four-feature column, analytics and agent assistance apply to every voice minute and message, and agent assistance also covers the 5,000 emails. Forecasting and evaluations cover all 50 agents.

Taxes and any delivery or storage charges are left out, so the totals below cover only the lines in the table.

Basic saves $1,510 a month on channels alone. When you add the four features, Connect Customer saves $2,010.

For a seat-based comparison, Genesys Cloud CX 3 is $7,750 a month for 50 users on an annual commitment, and NICE CXone Core Suite is $8,450 for 50 agents. Five9 quotes on request.

These totals use published seat prices without usage charges, so they aren't directly comparable with the Amazon Connect totals above.

Amazon Connect makes sense when you:

• Run agent assistance on voice, where Connect Customer’s $0.038 is below Basic’s $0.041 with the analytics it requires

• Have volume that varies from month to month, since channel usage has no seat fee

Amazon Connect is a poor match when you:

• Need a fixed seat price, such as Genesys Cloud CX 1 at $75 per user/month billed annually

• Take inbound calls on toll-free numbers, which cost $0.0120 per minute versus $0.0022 on a DID

• Rely on Voice ID, which AWS stopped supporting on May 20, 2026

Amazon Connect Alternatives & Pricing Comparison

NICE CXone and Genesys Cloud CX both publish per-seat starting prices, so you can compare them with Amazon Connect pricing, which starts at a per-minute rate.

Genesys Cloud CX lists four plans, with CX 1 at $75 and CX 2 at $115, then CX 3 at $155 and CX 4 at $240 per user/month billed annually. The page says prices assume an annual commitment and usage-based pricing may apply.

Five9 doesn’t publish prices. Its pricing page sends buyers to a quote form, so ask Five9’s sales team for a per-seat rate at your agent count before you compare it with Amazon Connect.

NICE CXone lists five suites from $110 to $249 per agent per month. The Ultimate card shows $249 and $0.25 per session, which the card doesn't define.

Vendor prices checked on October 11, 2026. Confirm on each vendor's page before you sign off.

Cekura vs Amazon Connect: Which Should You Choose?

Cekura tests and monitors AI voice agents, including the calls your Connect number handles. Here's how it compares with Amazon Connect.

Cekura is better for testing what callers hear. It phones your Connect number and scores each call, repeating every scenario.

Amazon Connect is better for running the contact center itself, from routing and queues to flows and AWS's native flow tests.

Use both when flows or AI agents face callers, and you want a phone-level pass before each release.

AWS's native testing sends DTMF or text inputs through a flow, and the docs allow 5 concurrent tests and a queue of 100, with a 5-minute limit per simulation. Cekura's Amazon Connect testing guide says Connect's simulations don't test speech recognition or turn-taking.

Cekura dials your Connect number as a scripted caller and scores each call on metrics that include Expected Outcome and Transcription Accuracy.

In pre-production, Cekura Simulations dial the number your Connect instance answers, and a GitHub Action fails a pull request when any run in the tagged scenario set fails.

Under load, Cekura drives concurrent calls through the live phone path, capped at 10 concurrent calls on Pay as you go and 50 on Startup.

For post-production monitoring, calls you forward through the API are scored.

Testing a Connect number works by dialing it, but production monitoring works differently. Amazon Connect isn't one of Cekura's native integrations, so forwarding each completed call's transcript and recording to Cekura's observability API is custom code you maintain.

Native integrations work out of the box for Retell, Vapi, ElevenLabs, LiveKit, Pipecat, and Bland. Amazon Connect goes through the API route above.

When you compare voice agent platforms, track how often a scenario passes on all of its repeat runs. In Cekura's agent workflow benchmark, PolyAI passed all three runs on 87.80% of 82 scenarios, Retell on 75.61%, and LiveKit on 70.73%.

The benchmark covers 9 platforms, and each provider chose its own setup. Amazon Connect isn't one of those 9, so run the same scenarios on your Connect number and compare how often each one passes.

On Cekura's pricing page, Pay as you go charges $0.25 per minute for voice testing and $0.025 per reply for text-based simulations. Seats beyond the first free one are $30 a month each. New accounts start with 300 free credits, about 60 minutes.

The Startup plan costs $500 a month on a month-to-month basis, with 10 seats and 10,000 credits, enough for about 2,000 minutes of simulated calls or up to 10,000 monitored calls.

Cekura supports SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance, covering transcript redaction, role-based access, and audit trails.

If you're adding an AI voice agent to your Connect instance, our guide on pricing AI voice agents covers how telephony, model, and speech charges add up.

Book a demo to see Cekura place test calls to your Connect instance.

What to Check on Amazon Connect Pricing Before You Commit

Connect Customer charges $0.038 per voice minute and includes analytics, agent assistance, forecasting, and evaluations. Customer Basic charges $0.018 and prices each of them separately.

In my 50-agent example, Basic costs $1,510 less on channels alone and $2,010 more once those four features are on.

Count your features first, then add telephony, storage, and delivery charges, because none of them is included in the voice rate.

Before you sign, ask AWS for a quote that uses your own region and number mix. The pricing page doesn't say which region its rates apply to, and telephony rates differ by country.

If you also test voice agents on your Connect number, add Cekura's testing and monitoring charges to that total.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Much Does Amazon Connect Cost?

Amazon Connect costs $0.038 per voice minute on Connect Customer and $0.018 per minute on Customer Basic, plus telephony. Chat is $0.010 or $0.004 per message, and email $0.080 or $0.050 per email. AWS lists no minimums or long-term contracts.

What Is the Difference Between Connect Customer and Customer Basic?

The main difference between Connect Customer and Customer Basic is how the AI, scheduling, and evaluation features are priced. Connect Customer includes them in its channel rates, while Basic sets lower channel rates and charges for each feature separately.

How Much Does Amazon Connect Health Cost?

Amazon Connect Health costs $99 per user per month for ambient documentation, up to 600 encounters, with $0.036 per minute beyond that. Patient verification is $0.15 per action. Each feature is priced separately.

How Does Amazon Connect Work?

Amazon Connect runs a contact center inside your AWS account. You create an instance, claim a phone number or transfer an existing one, add agents and routing, and build flows that handle each contact.

Is Amazon Connect a Good Choice?

Amazon Connect works for teams whose volume varies month to month, because it charges by use and sets no seat price on channel usage.

What Are the Alternatives to Amazon Connect?

Two alternatives that publish prices are Genesys Cloud CX at $75 per user/month billed annually and NICE CXone at $110 per agent per month. Five9 also sells per seat but quotes on request.

Genesys and NICE quote different units (per user vs. per agent).