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Amazon Cognito pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives

Amazon Cognito (aws.amazon.com) is a auth provider. Pay-as-you-go per monthly active user by feature tier (Lite, Essentials, Plus), with separate rates for SAML/OIDC federated users and M2M token requests.. Free plan: 10,000 direct-sign-in MAUs/month on Lite and Essentials (does not expire); 50 federated MAUs free.

What Amazon Cognito costs

  • 10k MAU: free (10,000 MAUs fall within the 10,000-MAU monthly free tier on Lite or Essentials)
  • 100k MAU: $495/mo (Lite: 90,000 billed MAUs x $0.0055 = $495 (Essentials would be 90,000 x $0.015 = $1,350))
  • B2B, 3 SSO: $3.75/mo (No native organizations; 3 SAML/OIDC IdPs federated into a user pool. 700 direct MAUs free; 300 federated MAUs - 50 free = 250 x $0.015 = $3.75)

Plan compared: Lite (free tier). Prices are USD per month on monthly billing (annual-only plans divided by 12) for the vendor's hosted service: the headline is a production app with 10,000 monthly active users signing in with email/password and Google, and we also price 100,000 MAU and a B2B app with 1,000 MAU and 3 enterprise SSO customers. Free plans count when they allow production use at that volume.

What Amazon Cognito does

Core: End-user sign-up & login, Compliance & data residency.

Important: Social login (partly), Multi-factor authentication (partly), Prebuilt login UI (partly), Custom auth flows (partly), Enterprise SSO (partly), Roles & permissions (partly), M2M tokens & API keys (partly), OAuth provider & MCP auth (partly), Native mobile SDKs.

Also has: Magic links & one-time codes (partly), Passkeys, Organizations & multi-tenancy (partly), Directory sync (SCIM) (partly), Bot & fraud protection (partly), User import & export (partly).

Amazon Cognito price hikes

Alternatives to Amazon Cognito

Amazon Cognito is the cheapest auth provider we track at 10,000 monthly active users. The others:

Amazon Cognito alternatives: 2 auth providers compared, at every size.

Every change we logged

  • Nov 22, 2024 · Free tier cut: With the Lite/Essentials/Plus tiers launched on Nov 22, 2024, new user pools get 10,000 free MAUs a month instead of 50,000, and the new default Essentials tier costs $0.015/MAU versus Lite's $0.0055.

Sources

Pricing page: aws.amazon.com/cognito/pricing. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Prices from the official AWS Cognito pricing page (US regions); the 2024 free-tier cut is documented on the same page via the grandfathering terms for pre-Nov-22-2024 Lite pools. B2B priced via federation since Cognito has no native organization model.