Amazon Bedrock AgentCore moves to consumption-based pricing for short-term memory

What changed

Source summary

AWS replaced the flat per-event charge for Amazon Bedrock AgentCore's short-term agent memory with consumption-based pricing: $1.00/GB for ingestion, $0.20/GB for retrieval, and $0.10/GB-month for storage. Ingestion and retrieval have a 12 KB minimum and 64 KB maximum billable size per event; storage is billed on each event's actual size. Long-term memory pricing is unchanged, and the new pricing applies in all AWS regions where AgentCore Memory is offered.

Why it matters to your work

Practical interpretation

If your team runs AI agents on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, short-term memory costs now scale with the data your agents actually read and write rather than a flat per-event fee, and AWS says most workloads, especially small frequent events, should see lower costs. This is mainly relevant to technical or cloud-infrastructure teams managing AWS AI spend, not a feature end users will notice directly.

When this could help

Worth reviewing when forecasting or optimising AWS spend for agent workloads that use AgentCore short-term memory, or when deciding whether a shorter memory time-to-live (TTL) would reduce storage costs.

AgentCore's short-term agent memory is now billed by the data actually ingested, retrieved and stored instead of a flat per-event charge. AWS states most workloads should cost less under the new model, especially agents that write frequent, small events.

What to check

• Rates: $1.00/GB for ingestion, $0.20/GB for retrieval, $0.10/GB-month for storage. Ingestion and retrieval are billed per event with a 12 KB minimum and 64 KB maximum billable size per event; storage is billed on each event's actual size. Long-term memory pricing is unchanged by this update. Source ↗
• The announcement does not state an effective date beyond its October 12, 2026 posting date, and does not quantify typical bill impact for any specific workload size. Source ↗