t3.nanoAWS Pricing, Specs & Benchmarks

The t3 family is AWS's default general-purpose burstable line on x86 — Intel Xeon Platinum 8000-series cores with a 2.5 GHz baseline and an all-core turbo around 3.1 GHz. For most teams running web apps, small databases, dev/test boxes, microservices, or CI build agents, t3 is the obvious starting point: cheap, widely available in every AWS region, and good enough at single-thread work to feel responsive. t3.nano at $0.0052/hr On-Demand (~$3.74/mo) is one of the cheaper rungs of the family.

Burstable means the instance has a baseline CPU level (a fraction of one vCPU's full capacity) and earns CPU credits when it's idle below that baseline. When traffic spikes, it spends those credits to burst above the baseline up to 100% of all its vCPUs. For bursty workloads — a blog that's quiet most of the day, a CI runner that compiles for a few minutes per hour, a dev box that sits idle overnight — this is dramatically cheaper than paying for an always-on m-series or c-series equivalent. For sustained-CPU work, you'll either burn credits and get throttled, or pay for "Unlimited Mode" surcharges that erode the savings. If your workload runs >40% CPU for hours at a stretch, m6i / m7i is probably the better fit.

Compared to its siblings: **t3a** is the same instance on AMD EPYC silicon, ~10% cheaper per hour with slightly lower single-thread performance — a near drop-in replacement if your stack is AMD64-compatible (almost all x86_64 Linux is). **t4g** is the same instance on ARM (Graviton2), another 10–20% cheaper, but you need ARM64-built containers and binaries. **t2** is the previous generation — older Xeons, lower baseline, no longer the cost-effective default. AWS publicly recommends moving t2 workloads to t3.

t3.nano ships 2 vCPUs and 0.5GB of RAM. Spot drops to $0.0015/hr (~71% off), which makes it viable for fault-tolerant batch jobs and CI fleets that can tolerate interruption. The regional pricing table below shows where it's currently cheapest; comparison against t3a and t4g siblings is one click away in the related-instances section.