Free tool
EKS hidden costs calculator
NAT Gateway, cross-AZ traffic and forgotten EBS volumes are usually what surprises people most on a cluster bill. Estimate what you pay and how much you can recover. Takes a minute.
Your setup
Find it in Cost Explorer: NatGateway-Bytes usage.
Find it in Cost Explorer: DataTransfer-Regional-Bytes usage.
Volumes in the available state in EC2.
Estimated savings
$504per month
$6,042 per year · 57% of the cost in these three areas
Realistic range: $302 – $579 per month
Where the money is
- NAT GatewayYou pay today: $324
Recoverable: $68 · Gateway endpoint for S3 and DynamoDB (free) and interface endpoints for ECR, STS and logs
- Cross-AZ trafficYou pay today: $400
Recoverable: $200 · Topology-aware routing and replicas spread across AZs
- EBS volumesYou pay today: $660
Recoverable: $236 · Delete orphaned volumes and move gp2 to gp3 (no downtime)
Estimate based on AWS list prices, not a quote. Your actual number depends on your architecture, discounts and traffic pattern, which is what a technical assessment measures.
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How this estimate is calculated
It is not a measurement of your environment: it is a simple model with list prices and conservative assumptions that I use as a starting point in assessments.
- 1.NAT Gateway. Each NAT costs $0.045 per hour (about $33 per month) plus $0.045 per GB processed. Traffic to S3 and DynamoDB becomes free with a gateway endpoint. Traffic to other AWS services drops to $0.0100 per GB with interface endpoints, minus 3 endpoints (ECR api, ECR dkr and STS) per AZ at $0.0100 per hour.
- 2.Cross-AZ traffic. AWS charges $0.01 per GB in each direction, or $0.02 per GB in total. I assume 50% of it can stay in the same AZ with topology-aware routing and well-spread replicas. The rest is needed, for example database replication.
- 3.EBS volumes. Unattached volumes cost $0.080 per GB-month (gp3). I assume 85% can be deleted, with the rest kept as a precaution. Attached gp2 volumes cost $0.100, and moving to gp3 saves the difference.
Realistic range
The low end is 60% of the estimate and the high end is 115%. Each fix takes engineering effort, and not all traffic can be rerouted.
What the calculator does not consider
Negotiated discounts (EDP, Private Pricing), the cost of the endpoints themselves in accounts with many VPCs, cross-region and internet traffic, load balancers, snapshots and migration cost. That is why the result is an order of magnitude, and a technical assessment measures the real number.
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