Amazon Connect Pricing for Outbound Calling: Per-Minute Cost Breakdown

Amazon Connect's pricing page shows one number for voice, $0.038 a minute. The public AWS Price List API shows two, because $0.038 is the AI voice rate and standard voice is $0.018. For outbound specifically there is a third and a fourth: outbound campaign audio is $0.025 a minute standard and $0.045 with AI, and every outbound call placed carries a separate $0.005 fee whether anyone answers it or not. Carrier telephony is on top of all of it.

Amazon Connect is one of the few contact center platforms that publishes a real meter instead of a contact form, and it goes further than the marketing page suggests. Every SKU is queryable through the AWS Price List API without an account. The figures below were read from that API for us-east-1 on August 29, 2026, which is why they are more granular than what the pricing page prints.

How much does Amazon Connect cost per minute?

It depends which of four voice SKUs your traffic lands on, and the spread between the cheapest and the most expensive is two and a half times.

The first thing worth noticing is that the AI version of a minute costs roughly 2.1 times the standard version, on both the general voice SKU and the outbound campaign SKU. AWS does not present it as an add-on with its own line. It is a different rate on the same unit, so the way you find out which one you are paying is by reading your bill after the fact.

The second is that $0.018 to $0.045 a minute buys you infrastructure, not a conversation. Connect handles the telephony, the routing, the recording and the analytics. Something still has to talk, and on Connect that something is a bot you build with Lex or Bedrock, prompt yourself, and maintain. That build cost never appears on a price list, and it is the largest number in most Amazon Connect projects.

What does Amazon Connect charge for outbound calls?

Two meters running at once: $0.025 or $0.045 for each minute of audio, and $0.005 for each call placed. The per-call fee is the one that catches cold calling programs, because it is charged on dials rather than connects, so it scales with the calls that fail.

Gong's analysis of 300 million calls puts the average cold call connect rate at 5.4%, rising to 13.3% in the top quartile, which works out to roughly 19 dials for every conversation at the average. Put those together and the arithmetic is easy. A team placing 30,000 dials a month at a 5.4% connect rate gets about 1,620 conversations. At a three minute average that is 4,860 connected minutes.

Under $400 of platform charge for 30,000 dials is genuinely cheap, and it is why Connect keeps winning technical evaluations. The honest caveat is that the two rows at the bottom of that table are where the money actually goes. Neither has a published rate, and neither shrinks when your dial volume does.

One structural note about that $0.005. Because it lands on calls made, improving your list quality reduces it and improving your script does not. It is the only line on the invoice that rewards calling fewer people, which is a strange incentive to have buried in a contact center bill and a good argument for scrubbing hard before a campaign runs. The same logic drives the compliance side of a dialing program, which we cover on TCPA compliance software.

What are the hidden costs in Amazon Connect pricing?

Three, and none of them appear on the marketing page.

The workforce SKUs cost more than the calls. Forecasting is $27 per agent and scheduling is $27 per agent, billed on the count of agents. Performance evaluations are $12 per agent. Run a ten agent floor with all three and that is $660 a month, which is nearly double the $368.70 of voice in the example above. Most buyers price the minutes carefully and treat workforce management as a checkbox, and it inverts the bill.

Connectors bill by the day, not the minute. The conversational analytics external voice connector is $100 per day, and the external voice transfer connector is another $100 per day. If you are piping an existing telephony platform into Contact Lens rather than running voice natively on Connect, that is roughly $3,000 a month per connector before a single minute is analyzed. The external voice analysis minutes themselves are cheap by comparison at $0.012 standard and $0.032 with AI.

Global Resiliency multiplies everything by 1.44. This one is consistent enough to be a rule. Standard voice goes from $0.018 to $0.026, AI voice from $0.038 to $0.055, outbound campaigns from $0.045 to $0.065, chat from $0.004 to $0.0058, tasks from $0.040 to $0.058, email from $0.050 to $0.072. Every multi-region SKU we checked is the single-region rate times about 1.44. If resilience is a requirement, model your whole usage bill at 1.44 rather than pricing it line by line.

Usage meters have no ceiling, which is the trade you accept for having no seat floor. Teams running metered infrastructure at volume generally end up watching cloud and SaaS spend against a budget continuously rather than finding out what happened when the invoice arrives.

Amazon Connect pricing for the other channels

Connect prices each channel separately, and each has a standard and an AI rate. The AI premium is not uniform across channels, which is worth knowing if you are routing work between them.

Outbound campaigns on the non-voice channels are cheaper still: $0.002 per email sent, $0.005 per SMS, $0.005 per WhatsApp message and $0.005 per custom action invoked. Chat carries the steepest AI premium at 2.5 times, while SMS carries the mildest at 1.4 times.

Is Amazon Connect cheaper than Five9 or Genesys?

At low seat counts, dramatically. At high seat counts with heavy service volume, the comparison stops being about price.

Five9 lists $119 and $159 per seat per month, but its own pricing page carries a footnote setting a minimum of 50 seats, so the smallest Five9 commitment is $7,950 a month at the Core rate. Genesys Cloud CX runs $75 to $240 per user per month annually. Talkdesk runs $85 to $225, and the US and Canada Express package it sells to firms under 50 employees requires 25 licences. NICE CXone publishes no figure at all.

Against those floors, an Amazon Connect bill under $400 for a 30,000 dial month looks like a different category of product, and in a real sense it is. Connect has no seat licence, no minimum and no contract, which means a two person team can run it. What the CCaaS suites sell instead is a finished product: routing rules, supervisor tooling, quality management and a support relationship, all configured rather than built. If you have engineers, Connect is cheaper by an order of magnitude. If you do not, the build absorbs the difference and then some.

We put all of these on one table, with Google's per-second voice rates alongside them, on AI call center software. The startup voice platforms that sit between the hyperscalers and the suites are priced out on AI voice agent pricing, and the BPO route is costed on outbound call center pricing.

Does Amazon Connect include a dialer?

It includes outbound campaigns, which handle list-based dialing, pacing and the per-call metering described above. What it does not include is the sales-team layer most outbound programs actually want: local presence, cadence management, CRM write-back of dispositions, and the number reputation tooling that keeps answer rates from collapsing.

Those are separate purchases. Number reputation in particular is priced as its own product across the market, running roughly 6 to 12.5 cents per branded call at the two vendors that publish full ladders, which we break down on branded caller ID. If your requirement is closer to a sales dialer than a contact center, the tier-by-tier comparison on cold calling software is a better starting point than Connect, and predictive dialer software covers the pacing modes and the FTC abandonment limits that come with them.

Who should actually buy Amazon Connect

Teams with engineers and volume. The meter is honest, it is public, it has no floor, and at 30,000 dials a month it prices out under $400 before telephony. That combination does not exist anywhere else in the category.

Teams without engineers should be careful, because the price list is the smallest part of the total. There is no bot in the box. Connect gives you the pipes, the recording and the analytics, and you supply the thing that talks, along with the prompt engineering, the evaluation loop and the maintenance when a model changes underneath you. Priced properly against a contractor or an internal team, that build routinely costs more in the first quarter than three years of Connect usage.

The middle path is a packaged agent that already talks and already dials, billed on connected minutes with no seat licence and no build. That is what we do, and our planned pricing is $499, $1,490 and $3,900 a month for roughly 1,500, 6,000 and 20,000 connected minutes, currently on a waitlist rather than open for purchase. Whichever route you take, do the arithmetic on your own dial count and connect rate first, because in outbound the calls that fail cost money too.