💸 What Does One Amazon Bedrock Prompt Cost? Find Out From the CLI (Hands-on)

A hands-on walkthrough shows how to calculate the cost of a single Amazon Bedrock prompt directly from the AWS CLI by sending a request to Amazon Nova Micro via the Converse API and reading the returned usage block, which reports inputTokens, outputTokens, and totalTokens. Multiplying those token counts by the model's per-1,000-token input and output prices yields a per-prompt cost, and capping output with maxTokens reduces it. The technique is presented as the practical core of Chapter 5 of a free AWS AI Practitioner (AIF-C01) course.

"Your team wants to add an Amazon Bedrock chatbot. How would you work out what one prompt costs?" It shows up in AIF-C01 prep and in real interviews. The strong answer: Bedrock charges per token, and every response tells you how many tokens it used. Let's prove that from the AWS CLI in 5 minutes. 👇 👉 Flow: Send one prompt → Read usage → Multiply by the price → Compare two prompts ✅ AWS CLI v2, signed in aws sts get-caller-identity works ✅ Region us-east-1 ✅ Model access for Amazon Nova Micro Bedrock console → Model access aws bedrock-runtime converse \ --region us-east-1 \ --model-id us.amazon.nova-micro-v1:0 \ --messages ' {"role":"user","content": {"text":"Explain overfitting in one sentence."} } ' \ --query '{answer: output.message.content 0 .text, usage: usage}' ✅ Expected your numbers will differ : { "answer": "Overfitting is when a model learns the training data so closely ...", "usage": { "inputTokens": 8, "outputTokens": 24, "totalTokens": 32 } } 👀 That usage block is your bill, in tokens. Open Amazon Bedrock pricing https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/pricing/ , find Nova Micro , and copy its price per 1,000 input tokens and per 1,000 output tokens . IN=8; OUT=24 from usage P IN=<price per 1K input tokens from the pricing page P OUT=<price per 1K output tokens awk -v i=$IN -v o=$OUT -v pi=$P IN -v po=$P OUT \ 'BEGIN { printf "USD %.8f per prompt\n", i/1000 pi + o/1000 po }' 💡 Multiply by prompts per day to get a daily cost. That's the number your manager wants. Ask for a long answer instead: --messages ' {"role":"user","content": {"text":"Explain overfitting in 500 words."} } ' 📈 outputTokens jumps, and output tokens cost more than input tokens. Then add --inference-config '{"maxTokens":50}' and watch the cost come back down. ✅ "Bedrock on-demand pricing is per input and output token" ✅ "Every Converse response returns inputTokens and outputTokens " ✅ "Output tokens usually cost more, so I cap them with maxTokens " ✅ "Cost per prompt × prompts per day = the daily bill" This is the hands-on cut of Chapter 5 of our free AWS AI Practitioner AIF-C01 course: the full chapter explains tokens, why they drive cost, and how the exam asks about them.