AWS prices AI agent tool governance at $17 a month

AWS put a price on governing what AI agents can touch, per an August 21 post about its Bedrock AgentCore Gateway. The service charges $5 per million tool calls and $25 per million policy authorizations. For a 50-developer team running 572,000 monthly operations, that totals about $17. Cheap enough that cost stops being the excuse for skipping access control on agent tools.

The gateway rolls out in four stages: Connect, Control, Catalog and Harden. A team of 1 to 20 people starts with one SSO-backed MCP endpoint. Past 100 users, it adds identity-aware authorization, PII redaction and self-service tool publishing.

On the protocol side, it supports Cognito-backed JWT, OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code with PKCE, Dynamic Client Registration and Private Key JWT. That's standard enterprise identity plumbing, not something built from scratch. It works over MCP with Kiro, Claude Code, Cursor and Amazon Quick, so it sits in front of tools teams already use.

What AWS doesn't say is how that pricing holds up past the 50-developer example. Or what it costs a team running millions of operations a month instead of half a million.