Cost estimates

This page covers infrastructure and per-workflow costs for Pennsieve compute nodes.

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Compute nodes run in your own AWS account — all infrastructure and usage costs are billed directly by AWS, not by Pennsieve. The estimates below are based on AWS us-east-1 pricing at time of writing and may change. Refer to the AWS Pricing page for current rates.

Infrastructure Cost (Idle)

When no workflows are running, you pay only for always-on resources:

What you're paying for

Lambda functions, ECS tasks, Step Functions, DynamoDB, and CloudWatch all have zero cost when idle. LLM resources (Governor Lambda, usage table, SSM parameters) also have zero idle cost — the only LLM-specific infrastructure cost is the additional VPC endpoints in compliant mode.

Cost optimization

Shared NAT Gateway — Multiple compute nodes in the same AWS account can share a single NAT Gateway in secure mode. With 10 nodes sharing one NAT, the per-node cost drops from $45 to $4.50 — a 90% reduction.

Per-Workflow Execution Cost

Each workflow incurs small pay-per-use charges. The finalizer calculates a cost estimate automatically after every execution.

Example: simple 2-processor workflow

Two sequential processors, each running 60 seconds on the default 0.5 vCPU / 1 GB configuration, processing 100 MB of input data:

At 1,000 workflows per month with this profile, execution costs are roughly $3/month on top of the infrastructure base.

Example: 3-processor pipeline (30 minutes each)

Three sequential ECS processors, each running 30 minutes on 2 vCPU / 8 GB configuration, processing 5 GB of input data:

Fargate compute dominates the per-workflow cost. At 100 workflows per month, execution costs are roughly $18/month.

Example: large analysis pipeline with LLM (5 hours each)

Three sequential ECS processors on 4 vCPU / 30 GB configuration, each running 5 hours, processing 100 GB of input data. One processor calls Claude Sonnet for document analysis (~500K input tokens, ~100K output tokens).

Fargate compute and LLM usage split the cost roughly evenly. Without LLM, the same workflow would cost ~$5.06. At 10 workflows per month, total execution costs are roughly $81/month.

LLM / Bedrock Usage Cost

When LLM access is enabled, Bedrock usage is metered and subject to a configurable budget.

Per-model pricing

1 million tokens is roughly 750,000 words or ~3,000 pages of text.

Example workflows

1. Metadata extraction from clinical notes (Haiku)

Extract structured fields (diagnosis codes, medications, dates) from 500 clinical notes averaging 2 pages each.

2. Document summarization pipeline (Sonnet)

Summarize 50 research papers averaging 15 pages each.

3. Image analysis (Haiku)

Classify 200 pathology slide thumbnails with a text prompt.

4. High-volume daily pipeline (Haiku)

Nightly batch processing 10,000 short text records.

Budget controls

The default budget is $5.00 per day. Budget can be set to daily (resets at midnight UTC) or monthly (resets on the first of each month). Budgets are adjustable at runtime without redeployment.

Processors can also set a per-execution budget via executionBudgetUsd, providing a second layer of cost control that prevents a single workflow run from consuming the entire daily allowance.

Cost Tracking

Every workflow execution gets a cost estimate in the finalizer logs:

{
  "ecs": {"taskCount": 2, "totalSeconds": 120, "estimatedCost": 0.001892},
  "lambda": {"invocationCount": 7, "estimatedCost": 0.000626},
  "stepFunctions": {"stateTransitions": 9, "estimatedCost": 0.000225},
  "cloudWatchLogs": {"estimatedCost": 0.000054},
  "efsStorage": {"storageGB": 0.093, "durationHours": 0.05, "estimatedCost": 0.000002},
  "totalEstimatedCost": 0.002824
}

All resources are tagged with ComputeNodeId and Environment for cost allocation in AWS Cost Explorer.