Pricing
Cloud provider pricing for Alien Queue resources.
Alien provisions Queue in your customer's cloud. The customer pays the cloud provider directly — there is no Alien markup on infrastructure costs.
Prices shown for US East regions. Last verified: April 2026.
Request Pricing
| Provider | Service | Price per million requests | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS | SQS Standard | $0.40 | First 1M requests/month free. |
| GCP | Pub/Sub | ~$0.40 (per million messages) | Charged per message + data volume ($40/TiB). |
| Azure | Service Bus Basic | $0.05 | Basic tier. Standard: $10/mo base + per-message. |
Example: 10M Messages/month
| Provider | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| AWS SQS | $3.60 | 10M - 1M free = 9M × $0.40/M |
| GCP Pub/Sub | $4.00 | 10M × $0.40/M (data volume varies) |
| Azure Service Bus | $0.50 | Basic tier: 10M × $0.05/M |
Free Tiers
- AWS SQS: 1 million requests/month (always free).
- GCP Pub/Sub: 10 GiB of messages/month (always free).
- Azure Service Bus: No free tier.
Platform Notes
- SQS charges per request, where each request can contain up to 10 messages (batch). Alien's
receive()uses long polling (20-second wait) which counts as one request. - Pub/Sub pricing is based on message volume (data transferred), not just message count. Small messages are cheaper.
- Service Bus has tiered pricing. Basic is cheapest but limited. Standard includes topics and sessions at $10/month base.