AWS Lightsail prices its General Purpose Linux/Unix plans as flat monthly bundles: pick a tier, and memory, storage, and a transfer allowance all arrive packaged into one number. The entry tier runs $5/mo and bundles 0.5 GB of memory, 2 vCPUs, 20 GB SSD, and 1 TB of transfer under that one price. There is no separate compute meter and no separate bandwidth meter on this ladder, just a price per tier that already includes everything the tier is going to give you.
That bundling is the entire story on this page. The question isn't whether $5/mo sounds cheap next to a full-featured VPS. It's what paying for a bundled allowance actually costs a buyer compared to raw-IaaS competitors that meter compute and transfer separately, and where AWS Lightsail's own four-tier ladder stops scaling generously the higher a buyer climbs.
The Ladder, Priced Tier by Tier
AWS Lightsail's General Purpose Linux/Unix lineup runs four tiers on a public IPv4 address, plus a separate IPv6-only variant priced independently of that ladder. Every plan bundles the same five specs (price, memory, vCPUs, SSD storage, and transfer), captured verbatim below directly from AWS's own published pricing table.
| Plan | Price/mo | Memory | vCPUs | SSD Storage | Transfer | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| General Purpose entry tier (Linux/Unix, IPv4) | $5/mo | 0.5 GB | 2 vCPUs | 20 GB SSD | 1 TB | Static sites and light blogs |
| General Purpose second tier (Linux/Unix, IPv4) | $7/mo | 1 GB | 2 vCPUs | 40 GB SSD | 2 TB | Small CMS or app installs |
| General Purpose third tier (Linux/Unix, IPv4) | $12/mo | 2 GB | 2 vCPUs | 60 GB SSD | 3 TB | Dev/staging environments needing RAM headroom |
| General Purpose top tier (Linux/Unix, IPv4) | $24/mo | 4 GB | 2 vCPUs | 80 GB SSD | 4 TB | Light production apps needing burst memory |
| IPv6-only variant | $3.50/mo | 512 MB | 2 vCPUs | 20 GB SSD | 1 TB | IPv6-only builds that don't need a public IPv4 address |
How Price Scales Against the Transfer Bundle
Read the ladder top to bottom and the transfer allowance climbs by the same flat step at every rung: the entry tier includes 1 TB, the second tier steps up to 2 TB, the third tier reaches 3 TB, and the top tier tops out at 4 TB. Price and memory don't climb on that same flat schedule: from $7/mo to $24/mo, the price roughly doubles, and memory moves from 1 GB to 4 GB, also roughly doubling. Transfer, meanwhile, keeps adding the same single-step increment it added at every prior rung. The practical read: the bottom of the ladder is where the transfer bundle is most generous relative to price paid; the top of the ladder is where a buyer is mostly purchasing additional memory and vCPU headroom, with the extra transfer along for the ride rather than the point of the upgrade.
That distinction matters for how a buyer should actually shop this ladder. Someone choosing between $5/mo and $7/mo is largely choosing how much transfer and memory they want at a modest price step. Someone choosing between $12/mo and $24/mo is really choosing compute headroom. The transfer allowance on the top tier is not meaningfully more usable for most small sites than the tier below it, so paying the jump only makes sense if the workload actually needs the extra memory the top tier bundles, not because the transfer number happens to look bigger on the pricing page.
SSD storage follows the same pattern as memory rather than the flat pattern transfer follows. Storage moves from 20 GB SSD on the entry tier up through 40 GB SSD, 60 GB SSD, and 80 GB SSD at the top, and each rung adds a bigger storage step than the flat transfer step adds. That reinforces the same read: past the entry tier, this ladder is really pricing compute and disk headroom, with the transfer allowance riding along as a fixed, evenly-spaced add-on rather than the variable a buyer is actually paying to scale.
The IPv6-Only Variant: A Different Kind of Discount
The IPv6-only variant sits outside the four-rung ladder entirely, priced on its own at $3.50/mo. Compare its specs to the General Purpose entry tier and the discount's source becomes clear: transfer is identical at 1 TB, and storage is identical at 20 GB SSD. Memory on the IPv6-only variant is listed as 512 MB, functionally the same amount the entry General Purpose tier bundles as 0.5 GB, just captured in a different unit on AWS's own pricing table.
What's actually different is the public IPv4 address, and that's what the price gap between the IPv6-only variant and the entry General Purpose tier is buying back for AWS, not for the buyer. A workload that can run IPv6-only (an internal service, a peer behind a load balancer or CDN that handles the public-facing IPv4 side, a dev/test box) gets the same bundled transfer and storage for less. A workload that needs a public IPv4 address reachable directly (most small-business sites still do) doesn't have this variant available to it as a real option regardless of price.
Where the Bundle Sits Against Raw-IaaS Pricing
AWS Lightsail's entry price sits inside the same range as its raw-IaaS peers, though not at the bottom of it. DigitalOcean's cheapest Droplet starts at $4.00 and bundles 500 GiB of transfer of its own, a lower entry price than Lightsail's, with a comparable, if differently denominated, transfer allowance. Vultr's cheapest instance starts even lower, at $2.50/mo. Linode (Akamai)'s entry tier lands exactly on Lightsail's own number, at $5.00.
The gap isn't really about the size of the bundled allowance. Lightsail's entry-tier transfer bundle is a generous number next to a typical entry-tier raw-IaaS allowance. The gap is about what happens once a workload is past the bundle. DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode are raw-IaaS platforms that generally meter usage beyond an included allowance rather than forcing a jump to the next fixed tier. Linode, for instance, prices its compute-tier egress overage at US$0.005 per GB, a per-GB rate a buyer only pays if usage actually exceeds the included amount. Lightsail's ladder doesn't offer that middle ground on this fact set: it's tier-to-tier, not allowance-plus-metered-overage, which is the practical meaning of an AWS-brand premium here -- a buyer gives up the lowest raw entry price on the market in exchange for staying inside a single AWS-managed bundle instead of watching a separate usage meter.
What This Page Doesn't Tell You
This page cites only AWS Lightsail's own captured bundled-transfer allowances: from 1 TB at the entry tier up to 4 TB at the top of the General Purpose ladder, plus 1 TB on the IPv6-only variant. It does not state what AWS actually bills once a workload exceeds those bundles, because that overage rate is not present in this comparison's captured fact set for AWS Lightsail. Don't assume it mirrors a raw-IaaS competitor's per-GB rate, such as Linode's US$0.005 per GB compute-egress overage. AWS's own Lightsail overage pricing may be structured differently, and a buyer who expects to regularly exceed the bundled allowance should confirm the actual rate directly on AWS's own pricing page before choosing a tier based on the bundle alone.
Who the Bundle Actually Fits
AWS Lightsail's bundled-tier model fits a specific buyer best: someone who wants predictable, flat monthly billing with no risk of a surprise bandwidth line item, and who is willing to trade a lower headline entry price elsewhere for staying inside the AWS ecosystem: the same account, billing relationship, and IAM/VPC tooling a business might eventually grow into if it starts on Lightsail and later needs raw EC2, RDS, or other AWS-proper services. That's a qualitative tradeoff, not a pricing one: the bundle itself doesn't cost less than raw-IaaS competitors' entry tiers, it costs a modest premium for staying inside one AWS bill and one AWS console.
A buyer who just wants the cheapest fixed-allowance VPS with no plan to ever touch the rest of AWS has cheaper entry points available elsewhere among the providers compared here. A buyer already running other AWS services, or planning to, gets a genuine convenience argument for starting here instead of a separate raw-IaaS account.
- Buy if: predictable flat billing matters more than the lowest possible entry price, the workload fits inside a bundled transfer allowance without regularly testing its ceiling, and there's a real reason to keep the account inside AWS: existing AWS services, a team already fluent in the AWS console, or a stated plan to grow into EC2 or RDS later.
- Skip if: the only goal is the cheapest fixed-allowance VPS on the market, the workload's transfer usage is unpredictable enough that an unbundled, metered overage model would actually save money, or there's no other reason to be inside the AWS ecosystem at all.
For the wider pricing-model comparison across this guide's full set of providers, see the real cost of cloud VPS hosting. For the full decision path across all seven providers evaluated here, start at the cloud VPS hosting hub.