Pricing
Cloud provider pricing for Alien Function resources.
Alien provisions Functions in your customer's cloud. The customer pays the cloud provider directly — there is no Alien markup on infrastructure costs.
Prices shown for US East regions. Last verified: April 2026.
Compute Pricing
| Provider | Service | Per million invocations | Per GB-second | Per vCPU-second |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS | Lambda | $0.20 | $0.0000166667 | — |
| GCP | Cloud Run | $0.40 | $0.0000025 | $0.000024 |
| Azure | Container Apps | $0.40 | $0.000003 | $0.000024 |
Lambda charges per GB-second (memory × duration). Cloud Run and Container Apps charge separately for vCPU and memory.
Example: 1M Invocations, 200ms Average, 256 MB Memory/month
| Provider | Invocations | Compute | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS Lambda | $0.00 (free tier) | $0.83 | $0.83 |
| GCP Cloud Run | $0.00 (free tier) | $1.20 + $0.63 | $1.83 |
| Azure Container Apps | $0.00 (free tier) | $1.20 + $0.15 | $1.35 |
Compute calculated as: 1M × 0.2s × 0.25 GB = 50,000 GB-seconds.
Free Tiers
- AWS Lambda: 1M invocations + 400,000 GB-seconds/month (always free).
- GCP Cloud Run: 2M invocations + 180,000 vCPU-seconds + 360,000 GiB-seconds/month (always free).
- Azure Container Apps: 2M invocations + 180,000 vCPU-seconds + 360,000 GiB-seconds/month (always free).
Platform Notes
- Lambda uses ARM64 (Graviton) processors by default, which are ~20% cheaper than x86.
- Cloud Run charges for vCPU and memory separately. Per-instance concurrency means one container can handle multiple requests, reducing per-request compute cost.
- Container Apps pricing is similar to Cloud Run. Idle containers in "consumption" mode are charged at reduced rates.