Elastic Load Balancer Cost Calculator

cost = balancers × hours × hourly rate + balancers × hours × average capacity units × capacity-unit rate. Every Elastic Load Balancer has two components: a fixed hourly charge that applies even to an idle balancer, and a usage charge measured in capacity units. The capacity unit is not an average of your traffic — AWS evaluates several dimensions each hour and bills only the highest one, so a load balancer can be busy on bandwidth and idle on connections and still be charged as though it were fully loaded on bandwidth.

Idle-but-provisioned load balancers in dev and test accounts are a classic source of waste, because the fixed hourly charge runs whether or not a single request arrives.

This calculator takes 5 inputs: Load balancers running, Price per load-balancer-hour, Price per capacity-unit-hour, Average capacity units consumed per hour, Billable hours per month. The pre-filled defaults are a realistic starting point — replace them with figures from your own environment for a result you can act on.

The defaults are illustrative us-east-1 list prices — an Application Load Balancer bills per LCU-hour and a Network Load Balancer per NLCU-hour at a different rate, and both vary by region. Check the Elastic Load Balancing pricing page and replace the rate fields before budgeting.

CloudWatch publishes ConsumedLCUs for an Application Load Balancer and ConsumedLCUs for a Network Load Balancer. Take the average over a representative month rather than a peak hour, since the charge is computed hour by hour.