Amazon's fixed-price Linux VPS: 25 bundles from $5 a month, billed hourly up to that cap, with a public IPv4, 1-10 TB of transfer and no pause.
Short answer: One always-on personal agent (2 vCPU / 4 GiB / 20 GiB) costs about $23.54 a month here, the 10th cheapest of the 22 providers that run it as described. The AI model adds about $1.88 a month on top (DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (1017), 30 requests a day at 40k tokens each, median zero-retention price; from $0.46 at the cheapest host). Fits well: A small always-on service that needs a fixed public IPv4 and a flat bill: $5 for 2 vCPU / 0.5 GB, $12 for 2 vCPU / 2 GB, $24 for 2 vCPU / 4 GB.
Lightsail is AWS's simplified virtual private server. You pick a fixed bundle, an operating-system or application blueprint and a region, and get an ordinary Linux machine with its own kernel, root, SSH, a public IPv4 address and a built-in inbound firewall. There is no sandbox API, no pause and no agent runtime.
The catalogue is 25 Linux bundles with a public IPv4 address: 2 vCPU / 0.5 GB / 20 GB for $5 a month up to 64 vCPU / 256 GB / 1,280 GB for $1,764, plus memory-optimised bundles to 512 GB and compute-optimised bundles to 72 vCPU. IPv6-only bundles are $1.50 to $4 cheaper; Windows bundles cost more because they include a licence.
Everything else in the console is a separate product with its own meter: container services, managed MySQL and PostgreSQL, object storage buckets, CDN distributions, load balancers, and Lightsail for Research (which has the GPU machines and a cheap stopped rate). Those are not priced by the Lightsail instance card and are easy to confuse with it.
At a glance
Who it is for
People who want one small Linux server that stays up, has a fixed public address and a predictable monthly bill, and who are happy to install and patch the agent themselves.
Isolation
A full Linux virtual machine per instance with its own kernel, root and SSH, on a burstable shared vCPU. RAM, SSD and the public IP are dedicated. Nested virtualisation is not documented, there is no GPU on ordinary instances, and the hypervisor is never named.
Sizes
25 Linux bundles with a public IPv4 address, from 2 vCPU / 0.5 GB / 20 GB / 1 TB transfer at $5 a month to 64 vCPU / 256 GB / 1,280 GB / 10 TB at $1,764. Memory-optimised reaches 512 GB, compute-optimised 72 vCPU. Fixed shapes only: no independent CPU, memory or disk sizing, and no in-place resize. 19 regions, six of them in the EU, four opt-in.
A personal agent here
About $23.54 a month for one always-on 2 vCPU / 4 GiB machine (Medium-4GB: 2 vCPU / 4 GiB / 80 GiB), before the AI model. Change the numbers
Our reading of the sourced material on this page, not a provider claim.
Fits well
A small always-on service that needs a fixed public IPv4 and a flat bill: $5 for 2 vCPU / 0.5 GB, $12 for 2 vCPU / 2 GB, $24 for 2 vCPU / 4 GB.
A bot, MCP server or webhook receiver that must stay awake: there is no idle timeout and no session cap.
Teams already on AWS that want the same IAM, CloudTrail, DPA, SOC reports and regional footprint for a small machine.
Cheap regional presence: 19 regions including six in the EU, with 1-10 TB of transfer included.
Disk-heavy but CPU-light work: 1,280 GB of SSD is included from $384 a month, and extra disks go to 16 TB.
Fits badly
Bursty, short-lived work: a ten-minute task pays for its hours, and there is no per-run sandbox API, so a code interpreter has no cheap path.
Anything that needs to stop and resume mid-process: stopping powers the machine down and keeps billing.
Four or more vCPU: the ladder jumps from $44 (2 vCPU) to $84 (4 vCPU), which is dear for a VPS.
A reader who wants the provider to install the agent: there is no Hermes or OpenClaw template, no coding agent and no prompt API.
A hard monthly ceiling: AWS Budgets can alert or block new resources, but nothing stops a running instance at a spend limit.
Automatic HTTPS on a bare instance: certificates come with the $18/month load balancer, or you run Caddy or Certbot yourself.
How it bills
Model
On-demand per instance, at the bundle's hourly rate, capped at its monthly price. No account fee and no commitment.
Meter
Per instance-hour. AWS's price list sets the hourly rate at the monthly price divided by 744, so a 730-hour month bills $23.54 on the $24 bundle and the cap only binds in a 31-day month.
While stopped
A stopped instance keeps billing at the full hourly rate: AWS says instances 'accrue charges even when they are in the stopped state'. Stopping powers the machine down and keeps the disk, but memory and processes are gone. Only deleting the instance ends the charge.
Plan fee
None. Container services, managed databases, load balancers ($18 a month), object storage and CDN distributions are separate products with their own prices.
Minimum
$5 a month for the smallest public-IPv4 Linux bundle, or $3.50 for the IPv6-only one. A payment method is required to open the AWS account; new accounts get up to $200 of credits for six months.
The cheapest fixed-price Linux VPS here with a public IPv4 address: $5 a month for 2 vCPU / 0.5 GB / 20 GB and 1 TB of transfer.
1-10 TB of transfer included per bundle, with outbound overage at $0.09-$0.17 a GB.
19 regions including Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris, Stockholm and Spain.
A static IPv4 address is free while attached and costs $0.005 an hour when detached.
Snapshots at $0.05 per GB-month, with seven daily automatic snapshots, and block storage at $0.10 per GB-month up to 16 TB per disk.
AWS IAM, CloudTrail, SOC 1/2/3 reports, a DPA and a 99.5% per-instance SLA come with the account.
Using it without writing code
Dashboard
Yes. The Lightsail console creates an instance in a few clicks, shows CPU, network and status graphs, opens a browser SSH or RDP session, and manages static IPs, firewalls, disks, snapshots and DNS zones.
Without code
Partly. Creating the machine and opening its terminal needs no local software, but installing any agent, TLS or Docker is terminal work, and there is no one-click agent template.
Signup
An AWS account, which requires a payment method. New accounts get $100 of credits at sign-up and can earn up to $100 more, on a Free plan that closes after six months or when the credits run out.
Docs and support
A large documentation set with Markdown versions, an API reference for every action, a CLI tutorial and blueprint guides. Support is AWS Support, which is paid beyond the basic plan.
Tools you can use
Amazon Lightsail has 7 of the 10 ways to drive a machine that this guide checks, and 1 more with a catch. From its own documentation; how pleasant each one is to use was not tested. Compare every provider
MCP serverWith a catch Generic AWS MCP. AWS's official MCP server is generic: it can call any AWS API, including Lightsail's, but has no Lightsail-specific tools or skills.
Your own imageWith a catch You can rebuild from a snapshot of your own configured instance, but you cannot import an image or build one from a Dockerfile made elsewhere.
Automatic HTTPSWith a catch Automatic certificates come only with the $18/month load balancer or the WordPress blueprint's guided Let's Encrypt setup; a plain instance has none.
MCP serverWith a catch AWS's official MCP server is generic: it can call any AWS API, including Lightsail's, but has no Lightsail-specific tools or skills.
Desktop for computer useWith a catch Only Windows bundles have a desktop, reached by RDP; Linux instances have no graphical desktop and there is no browser-streamed desktop or computer-use API.
From the profile's company section: the legal entity, who funds it, and what a buyer can check before signing.
Legal entity
Amazon Web Services, Inc., an Amazon company. The Customer Agreement names the contracting party by account country, and AWS, Inc. is the default when the country cannot be determined.
“If you have not provided AWS with location information to determine your Account Country, your AWS Contracting Party is Amazon Web Services, Inc.”aws.amazon.comdocs-confirmed
Uptime promise
99.5% monthly uptime per instance, and 99.99% at region level, with service credits below those figures. The SLA is a commercially reasonable efforts commitment.
“AWS will use commercially reasonable efforts to make the Single Lightsail Instance available with an Instance-Level Uptime Percentage, as shown in the table below during any monthly billing cycle”aws.amazon.comdocs-confirmed
Certification
SOC 1, SOC 2 and SOC 3 reports cover the AWS infrastructure. The SOC 2 report is available to customers through AWS Artifact.
“AWS SOC 2 Security, Availability, Confidentiality, & Privacy Report available to AWS customers from AWS Artifact.”aws.amazon.comdocs-confirmed
Data processing
The AWS Service Terms incorporate the AWS Data Processing Addendum for customer data, plus the Standard Contractual Clauses for transfers.
“These Service Terms incorporate the AWS Data Processing Addendum (“DPA”), when you use AWS Services to process Customer Data (as defined in the DPA).”aws.amazon.comdocs-confirmed
Status page
The AWS Health Dashboard shows service health for all AWS services; Lightsail has no dedicated status page.
“All customers can use the AWS Health Dashboard, powered by the AWS Health API. The dashboard requires no setup, and it's ready to use for authenticated AWS users.”docs.aws.amazon.comdocs-confirmed
Caveats and contradictions
Shown as the research found them. A contradiction means the provider's own pages disagree; an open question means the answer is not published.
01
A stopped instance bills in full Open question
AWS says Lightsail instances 'accrue charges even when they are in the stopped state'. Workload C therefore costs $23.54 whether it runs for 90 hours or 730, and the only way to stop paying is to delete the machine and keep a snapshot.
02
Partial instance-hours have no published rounding rule Open question
The pricing page and FAQ say billing is hourly, and the price list bills in hours, but neither says whether a ten-minute run is charged ten minutes or a whole hour. This profile assumes pro-rata hours, which makes A $5.38; a whole-hour rule would make it $32.25.
03
The billing FAQ's own example uses a stale rate Contradiction
The billing FAQ says the cheapest plan is '$0.0067 USD/hour ($5 USD/month)' and then illustrates with '46 cents (100*0.0046)'. The $0.0046 figure matches neither the current $5 bundle ($0.00672) nor the $3.50 IPv6-only bundle ($0.00470) in AWS's price list. This profile uses the price list.
“For example, if you use the least expensive Lightsail instance plan for 100 hours in a month, you will be charged 46 cents (100*0.0046).”
Lightsail for Research is a different product with different stopped billing Open question
Research virtual computers bill $0.00685 an hour while stopped and are the only Lightsail machines with GPUs. Ordinary Lightsail instances bill their full hourly rate while stopped and have no GPU, so a reader comparing the two will draw the wrong conclusion about pausing.
05
The cheap bundles changed shape without a launch date Open question
The pricing page footnotes that virtual servers created on or before 29 June 2023 have 1 vCPU where the $5, $7 and $12 bundles now list 2. This profile prices a new instance; an older account's machine may be half the CPU for the same price.
06
Nested virtualisation is undocumented Open question
No Lightsail page says whether an instance can run KVM or another hypervisor inside it. Treat it as unknown rather than supported; Docker does not need it, Android emulators and Firecracker do.
What users say
Opinion, not research. Read from public Trustpilot and Reddit pages on 30 October 2026. It changes no verdict on this page; everything above comes from Amazon Lightsail's own documents.
Trustpilot 1.3 out of 5 from 433 reviews · see the page
The 'Aws Amazon' page covers the whole AWS account: EC2, billing, support and even Amazon retail orders. No review read mentions Lightsail by name.
The AWS page is almost entirely about account-level pain: bills that do not match usage, accounts frozen during verification and support that is slow or sold separately. Lightsail appears on Reddit mainly as a small $5 VPS people benchmark against cheaper hosts, not as a product with its own review base.
How much to trust this: Off-product evidence: no review read mentions Lightsail, and at least one is about Amazon retail orders. Do not treat the 1.3 rating as a Lightsail score.
Complaint
Billing errors and disputed charges
“I ran an EC2 instance for about 1 hour and AWS billed me for about 60 instance-hours.”
Lightsail's hourly price is the monthly price divided by 744 (31 days), taken from AWS's own price list. A 730-hour month therefore bills $23.54 on the $24 bundle, and the $24 cap is only reached in a 31-day month. The calculator's monthly cap reproduces this.
A stopped instance is still billed: 'Lightsail instances and managed databases incur charges until they are deleted. These resources accrue charges even when they are in the stopped state.' Only deleting the instance ends the charge.
AWS does not publish whether a partial instance-hour is rounded up. The card bills pro-rata hours, so A (166.67 hours) costs $5.38. If each of the 1,000 ten-minute runs were billed a whole hour, A would be $32.25. This is an open question, not a modelled rule.
The bundle includes its SSD and its public IPv4 address; there is no separate disk or IP line. Extra block storage is $0.10 per allocated GB-month, attached to one instance, 8 GB to 16 TB per disk and 15 disks per instance.
IPv6-only bundles are $1.50-$4 cheaper a month ($3.50 for 0.5 GB) but cannot take a static IPv4 address. This card prices the public-IPv4 bundles.
Windows bundles cost more ($9.50-$4,204 a month) because they include a Windows Server licence. Not priced here.
Snapshots cost $0.05 per GB-month, manual and automatic. Automatic snapshots keep the latest seven daily copies and are deleted with the instance. Not in the calculator.
AWS labels memory and disk in GB; the card treats those numbers as GiB, the unit the site uses throughout. The difference is about 7% and never changes which bundle is the smallest fit at the sizes A/B/C use. All 25 Linux bundles with a public IPv4 address are listed.
Lightsail containers, managed databases, object storage, CDN distributions, load balancers and Lightsail for Research are separate products on separate meters and are not priced by this card.
Lightsail's hourly price is the monthly price divided by 744 (31 days), taken from AWS's own price list. A 730-hour month therefore bills $23.54 on the $24 bundle, and the $24 cap is only reached in a 31-day month. The calculator's monthly cap reproduces this.
A stopped instance is still billed: 'Lightsail instances and managed databases incur charges until they are deleted. These resources accrue charges even when they are in the stopped state.' Only deleting the instance ends the charge.
AWS does not publish whether a partial instance-hour is rounded up. The card bills pro-rata hours, so A (166.67 hours) costs $5.38. If each of the 1,000 ten-minute runs were billed a whole hour, A would be $32.25. This is an open question, not a modelled rule.
The bundle includes its SSD and its public IPv4 address; there is no separate disk or IP line. Extra block storage is $0.10 per allocated GB-month, attached to one instance, 8 GB to 16 TB per disk and 15 disks per instance.
IPv6-only bundles are $1.50-$4 cheaper a month ($3.50 for 0.5 GB) but cannot take a static IPv4 address. This card prices the public-IPv4 bundles.
Windows bundles cost more ($9.50-$4,204 a month) because they include a Windows Server licence. Not priced here.
Snapshots cost $0.05 per GB-month, manual and automatic. Automatic snapshots keep the latest seven daily copies and are deleted with the instance. Not in the calculator.
AWS labels memory and disk in GB; the card treats those numbers as GiB, the unit the site uses throughout. The difference is about 7% and never changes which bundle is the smallest fit at the sizes A/B/C use. All 25 Linux bundles with a public IPv4 address are listed.
Lightsail containers, managed databases, object storage, CDN distributions, load balancers and Lightsail for Research are separate products on separate meters and are not priced by this card.
Lightsail's hourly price is the monthly price divided by 744 (31 days), taken from AWS's own price list. A 730-hour month therefore bills $23.54 on the $24 bundle, and the $24 cap is only reached in a 31-day month. The calculator's monthly cap reproduces this.
A stopped instance is still billed: 'Lightsail instances and managed databases incur charges until they are deleted. These resources accrue charges even when they are in the stopped state.' Only deleting the instance ends the charge.
AWS does not publish whether a partial instance-hour is rounded up. The card bills pro-rata hours, so A (166.67 hours) costs $5.38. If each of the 1,000 ten-minute runs were billed a whole hour, A would be $32.25. This is an open question, not a modelled rule.
The bundle includes its SSD and its public IPv4 address; there is no separate disk or IP line. Extra block storage is $0.10 per allocated GB-month, attached to one instance, 8 GB to 16 TB per disk and 15 disks per instance.
IPv6-only bundles are $1.50-$4 cheaper a month ($3.50 for 0.5 GB) but cannot take a static IPv4 address. This card prices the public-IPv4 bundles.
Windows bundles cost more ($9.50-$4,204 a month) because they include a Windows Server licence. Not priced here.
Snapshots cost $0.05 per GB-month, manual and automatic. Automatic snapshots keep the latest seven daily copies and are deleted with the instance. Not in the calculator.
AWS labels memory and disk in GB; the card treats those numbers as GiB, the unit the site uses throughout. The difference is about 7% and never changes which bundle is the smallest fit at the sizes A/B/C use. All 25 Linux bundles with a public IPv4 address are listed.
Lightsail containers, managed databases, object storage, CDN distributions, load balancers and Lightsail for Research are separate products on separate meters and are not priced by this card.