What AWS Trusted Advisor actually costs
Trusted Advisor is partly free. Every AWS account gets 56 checks at no cost, covering service limits and a short list of security and fault-tolerance items. The remaining 426 checks require Business Support+, which starts at $29 per month per account. Support is billed per account, not per organisation, so the cost multiplies across a multi-account estate. Developer, Business and Enterprise On-Ramp plans were closed to new subscriptions in December 2025 and are discontinued on 1 January 2027.
Most articles about Trusted Advisor pricing are out of date. AWS changed its support plans at the end of 2025 and the numbers moved. Here is what it costs now, and whether paying is worth it.
If you want to know what the checks find rather than what they cost, that is a different post: what Trusted Advisor checks, and what it structurally cannot.
Is Trusted Advisor free?
Partly, and the free part is more useful than its reputation suggests.
Every AWS account — including one on Basic Support paying nothing — gets 56 checks. That is AWS's own figure, not an estimate.
Most of them check service limits. That is the most useful part, not a leftover. Running out of a quota is one of the few AWS failures that warns you before it breaks something. Nothing else in AWS watches quotas for you. The rest is a short security and fault-tolerance list: public EBS and RDS snapshots, S3 bucket permissions, MFA on the root account, security groups with specific ports open, and STS global endpoint usage.
If you have never opened Trusted Advisor, the free tier alone is worth an hour.
What costs money
Business Support+ unlocks a further 426 checks, for a total of 482, starting at $29 per month, per account.
That $29 is a minimum, not a fixed price. AWS support has always cost more as your spend grows, so a bigger estate pays more than the floor. Check the current rates on AWS's support pricing page before you budget. That page is the only reliable source, and it has changed twice in eighteen months.
The detail that surprises people: support is billed per account. If you run separate accounts for production, staging and development — which is the pattern AWS itself recommends — you are paying the minimum three times before any usage-based component. A twelve-account organisation does not pay $29.
The 2027 change nobody has updated their blog post for
Three plans were closed to new subscriptions on 2 December 2025 and are discontinued on 1 January 2027:
- Developer Support
- Business Support
- Enterprise On-Ramp
Existing customers can stay until that date, or move earlier. Enterprise On-Ramp customers are being moved to Enterprise Support during 2026. They pay a reduced $5,000 minimum instead of the usual $15,000.
If your Trusted Advisor access depends on a Developer or Business plan, that access has an expiry date on it. Worth planning for now rather than finding out in January 2027.
Is it worth paying for?
Usually yes, and we would say that even though we sell something adjacent.
$29 a month for 426 checks is cheap. Any comparison that calls Trusted Advisor the expensive option is wrong — including one that favours us. For a team with one account, this is close to an automatic yes.
Two things change the cost:
| Your situation | What it means |
|---|---|
| One account, moderate spend | Near the $29 floor. Buy it. |
| Many accounts | Multiply by account count before deciding |
| High spend | The usage-based component dominates; check the tiers |
| Already on Business Support for the support | You already have this. Go and look at it. |
That last row matters. Many teams buy a support plan for the response times, and never open the Trusted Advisor console they already paid for.
What you still will not have
Trusted Advisor checks configuration. It reads how a resource is set up and compares that against a best-practice rule. That finds a lot. It has one hard limit: it cannot find a fault that only exists between two settings, when each setting on its own is correct.
The example we keep meeting in production:
Capacity provider: managed scaling ENABLED ← valid
Auto Scaling group: min 2, max 2 ← valid
Neither line is wrong. Together they describe a tier that decides it needs more capacity and is not permitted to add any. Nothing fails, nothing alarms, and every runbook says the tier is protected by autoscaling.
No configuration checker will flag this, at any price. There is no misconfiguration to find. More checks would not help, because the problem is not in either setting — it is in the pair. We wrote it up in full here.
The short version
- Free: 56 checks on every account, mostly service limits. Genuinely useful.
- $29/month per account minimum: 482 checks total via Business Support+.
- Per account, not per organisation. Multiply by your account count.
- 1 January 2027: Developer, Business and Enterprise On-Ramp are gone.
- Verify the tiers on AWS's pricing page before budgeting. It moves.
If you are working out which tools you already have and which you actually need, the categories are laid out here.