Price the OCI flexible load balancer from its base hour plus the bandwidth it bills between the minimum and maximum shape.
The flexible load balancer has two dials: a minimum shape that sets the guaranteed bandwidth and the price floor, and a maximum shape that caps bursting. You are billed the base instance hour plus the bandwidth actually used above the included 10 Mbps, so a wide minimum-to-maximum range costs nothing extra until traffic arrives. Setting the minimum shape too high pays for bandwidth you never use every hour of the month, while setting the maximum too low throttles traffic during a spike — the flexible shape exists precisely so you do not have to choose one fixed size. Confirm the base and per-Mbps rates in the Oracle Cloud cost estimator for your region, and note the network load balancer is free if you only need layer 4.
OCI Load Balancer
monthly = load balancers × hours × (base rate + max(0, billed Mbps − 10) × per-Mbps rate), where billed Mbps is the used bandwidth clamped between the minimum and maximum shape.
monthly = load balancers × hours × (base rate + max(0, billed Mbps − 10) × per-Mbps rate), where billed Mbps is the used bandwidth clamped between the minimum and maximum shape. The flexible load balancer has two dials: a minimum shape that sets the guaranteed bandwidth and the price floor, and a maximum shape that caps bursting. You are billed the base instance hour plus the bandwidth actually used above the included 10 Mbps, so a wide minimum-to-maximum range costs nothing extra until traffic arrives.
Setting the minimum shape too high pays for bandwidth you never use every hour of the month, while setting the maximum too low throttles traffic during a spike — the flexible shape exists precisely so you do not have to choose one fixed size. Confirm the base and per-Mbps rates in the Oracle Cloud cost estimator for your region, and note the network load balancer is free if you only need layer 4.
This calculator takes 7 inputs: Minimum bandwidth shape, Maximum bandwidth shape, Average bandwidth used, Base price per load balancer hour, Price per Mbps-hour above 10 Mbps, Number of load balancers, Billed 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.