AWS bill line item
AWSSecretsManager-Secrets
A flat monthly charge (prorated hourly) for every secret stored in Secrets Manager, including each cross-region replica, regardless of how often it's used.
Secrets Manager per-secret storage fee
Verified against official AWS documentation last checked
Why it shows up
This is a storage cost, not a usage cost, so it accumulates purely from secret count. It's the dominant Secrets Manager charge for most accounts, not the API calls.
It commonly balloons from secret sprawl: the same credential duplicated per environment, per region, and per microservice, or old/rotated secrets that were never cleaned up.
How to cut it
- Audit for duplicate or unused secrets and delete (or schedule-delete) ones with no recent access activity.
- Consolidate secrets that don't need per-service isolation, and reconsider whether every region needs its own replica.
- Use cost allocation tags on secrets to attribute per-secret storage cost to the owning team/app, which makes sprawl visible.
- For low-sensitivity, non-rotating config values, consider a free parameter store instead of Secrets Manager.
How to read a usage type
AWSSecretsManager-Secrets carries no region or direction token, so there's nothing to break down here.
Source
Source: AWS docs →Found AWSSecretsManager-Secrets on your own bill?
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