With per-second billing, you pay for only what you use. It takes cost of unused minutes and seconds in an hour off of the bill, so you can focus on improving your applications instead of maximizing usage to the hour. Especially, if you manage instances running for irregular periods of time, such as dev/testing, data processing, analytics, batch processing and gaming applications, can benefit.

EC2 usage are billed on one second increments, with a minimum of 60 seconds. Similarly, provisioned storage for EBS volumes will be billed per-second increments, with a 60 second minimum. Per-second billing is available for instances launched in:

• On-Demand, Reserved and Spot forms
• All regions and Availability Zones
• Amazon Linux and Ubuntu