Bedrock AgentCore short-term memory moves from a per-event fee to per-gigabyte pricing
Victoria Shinder2 min readAWS has changed how Amazon Bedrock AgentCore charges for agent memory. Until now AWS charged a flat amount for every event written to short-term memory (STM), the in-session context an agent keeps. That fee is gone: the bill now follows how much data goes in, comes out and stays. Long-term memory, which carries knowledge across sessions, keeps its current pricing.
The new rates. There are three meters:
- writing data into memory: $1.00 per GB;
- reading it back: $0.20 per GB;
- keeping it: $0.10 per GB per month.
For writes and reads, each event counts as no less than 12 KB and no more than 64 KB, whatever its real size. The storage meter, by contrast, uses the size each event actually has.
Who pays less. AWS says most workloads see lower costs and that small-payload use cases see the largest reductions — the pattern it names is agents that write frequent, small events, which under a flat per-event fee paid the same for a few bytes as for a large payload. The billable floor sets the limit of that saving: an event below 12 KB is still billed as 12 KB for ingestion and retrieval.
Who should recalculate. The 64 KB ceiling on billable size works the other way: agents that write large events pay at most for 64 KB per event on ingestion and retrieval, while storage follows the real size. Workloads that keep memory for a long time pay for that through the storage dimension, and AWS points to a shorter time to live (TTL) on memory resources as the lever for controlling it.
Availability. The consumption-based pricing applies in all AWS Regions where AgentCore Memory is offered. Detailed figures are on the Amazon Bedrock AgentCore pricing page.
Source: AWS, "Announcing consumption-based pricing for short-term memory in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore" — https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/10/agentcore-memory-consumption-based-pricing