whichdevtool?
Menu
StacksDirectory Pricing changes Glossary
VPS and cloud servers App hosting and PaaS Managed databases Transactional email APIs Email marketing and newsletters Domain registrars CDN, DNS and edge security Monitoring, uptime and error tracking Auth and identity Frontend and full-stack frameworks Backend frameworks UI component libraries AI model APIs File and object storage Payments and billing Background jobs, queues and workflows ORMs and database toolkits

Managed message queue · by Amazon Web Services

Amazon SQS

AWS's fully managed message queue with standard and FIFO queues, billed per request with 1 million free requests every month and no minimum fee.

Visit aws.amazon.com ↗ Alternatives Free tier EU region
Amazon SQS homepage
§1

Overview

Amazon SQS is AWS's managed queue service. Producers send messages; consumers poll, process and delete them. Standard queues offer very high throughput with at-least-once delivery and best-effort ordering, while FIFO queues guarantee order within a message group and exactly-once processing. Dead-letter queues, delay queues, visibility timeouts and long polling are built in, and Lambda can consume queues directly.

Billing is per request: every API call counts, and each 64 KB chunk of payload is a separate request, but batching up to 10 messages per call cuts costs. The first 1 million requests each month are free for all customers, then standard requests cost about $0.40 per million and FIFO $0.50 per million, with volume tiers above 100 billion.

SQS is a queue, not a job framework: retries, scheduling, workflows and dashboards come from your own code, Lambda, Step Functions or libraries built on top. Delays are limited to 15 minutes per message, messages to 1 MiB, and in-flight messages to 120,000 per queue.

§2

Pricing and plans

Free tier · card required

1 million requests a month across all regions, every month (not limited to the first year)

At the limit Bills overage Requests past the free million are billed at the normal per-request rate to your AWS account.

Plan Price What you get
Free tier $0 1M requests/month
Standard queues $0.40 per million requests Tiered lower above 100 billion requests/month
FIFO queues $0.50 per million requests Ordered, exactly-once processing

Every SQS API action is a request; each 64 KB of payload is billed as one request, and one request can carry up to 10 messages (1 MiB total). The per-million prices did not render on the AWS pricing page when read; the $0.40 standard and $0.50 FIFO figures are from current third-party summaries (Wring, March 2026; Cloudburn) and match long-standing AWS rates. Fair-queue requests are charged fair-queue rates in addition to standard rates. Data transfer within a region is free; cross-region and internet transfer are billed. KMS encryption calls and S3 storage for large payloads are billed separately. Pricing is the same in all regions except China (Beijing).

Source: aws.amazon.com/sqs/pricing/ · prices as published, excluding tax.

§3

What it does

Standard and FIFO queues
Standard for throughput with at-least-once delivery; FIFO for strict ordering and exactly-once processing.
Dead-letter queues
Messages that fail repeatedly move to a separate queue for inspection and redrive.
Lambda integration
Lambda functions can poll and process SQS batches with no servers to run.
Fair queues
Messages tagged with a group ID in standard queues are balanced across tenants, at an extra fair-queue rate.
Encryption
Server-side encryption with SQS-managed or KMS keys.
§4

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • Permanent free tier of 1 million requests a month
  • No minimum fee and practically unlimited scale
  • Native triggers for AWS Lambda
  • Available in every AWS region, including the EU

Limitations

  • Each 64 KB of payload is billed as a separate request
  • Delays are capped at 15 minutes; no built-in cron or workflows
  • In-flight messages are limited to 120,000 per queue
  • Standard queues can deliver duplicates and out of order
§5

Who it suits

Good for

  • AWS apps decoupling services or buffering work
  • Lambda-based background processing
  • High-volume queues where per-request pricing is cheapest

Look elsewhere if

  • Developers who want retries, schedules and a job dashboard out of the box
  • Apps outside AWS that want push delivery to HTTP endpoints
§6

Alternatives to Amazon SQS

Tool From Free option Stages
DBOS Postgres-backed durable workflow library
$99/mo Open source
BullMQ Redis-based job queue library
$139/mo Open source
Sidekiq Redis-based background job library for Ruby
$99/mo Open source
Google Cloud Tasks Managed task queue with HTTP push delivery
Usage-based Free tier
Windmill Open-source job orchestrator, workflow engine and internal-tool platform
$10/mo Free tier
Hangfire Background job library for .NET
$500/yr Open source

All background jobs, queues and workflows →

§7

Questions

Is Amazon SQS free?

Every AWS account gets 1 million SQS requests a month free, permanently; usage beyond that is billed per request.

How much does Amazon SQS cost?

About $0.40 per million requests for standard queues and $0.50 per million for FIFO, with each 64 KB of payload counting as a request.

What is the difference between SQS standard and FIFO queues?

Standard queues maximise throughput with at-least-once delivery; FIFO queues keep order within a message group and deliver exactly once, at a higher price.

Can SQS delay a message?

Yes, by up to 15 minutes; longer schedules need EventBridge Scheduler or Step Functions.

Sources read for this page