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AWS NAT Gateway Cost Calculator

Work out what your NAT gateways cost a month in hourly and per-GB processing fees, and compare with Cloud NAT, Azure NAT Gateway and clouds that charge nothing.

Updated · By Niraj Kumar · 14 sources

Where

Servers and users inServers and users in
Enter volumes inEnter volumes in

Traffic to users

GB / month

Everything your servers, storage and CDN send to users and other services on the internet.

%
No CDNAll of it

Each provider's own CDN: CloudFront, Cloud CDN, Front Door, Cloudflare or Spaces CDN.

Traffic inside the cloud

GB / month

Replication, backups and calls to services in a different region.

GB / month

Service-to-service calls, load balancing and database replicas in other zones of the same region.

NAT and servers

GB / month

Outbound calls, package and image pulls from private subnets.

Usually one per availability zone.

Sets pooled transfer allowances and Cloud NAT's per-VM fee.

Monthly data transfer on AWS$453$5,437 a year
Internet egress
$83.16
Cross-AZ
$40.96
NAT gateway hours
$98.55
NAT data processed
$230
Price rank
8th cheapest of 8
Cheapest cloud with servers
Oracle Cloud
$0.00 a month, $453 less
Every provider on this traffic, per month, North AmericaHover or focus a row for its line items.
  1. 1Cloudflarebandwidth only$0.00Cloudflare runs no servers, so region, zone and NAT traffic is priced on whatever compute sits behind it.
  2. 2Oracle Cloud$0.00
  3. 3DigitalOcean$0.00DigitalOcean has no managed NAT gateway to bill; servers reach the internet on their own addresses.
  4. 4Akamai Cloud (Linode)$0.00Linode has no managed NAT gateway to bill; servers reach the internet on their own addresses.
  5. 5Hetzner Cloud$0.00Hetzner has no managed NAT gateway to bill; servers reach the internet on their own addresses.
  6. 6Google Cloud$392
  7. 7Microsoft Azure$409
  8. 8AWS$453
Line by line, per month
ProviderInternet egressCross-AZNAT gateway hoursNAT data processedTotal
Cloudflare––––$0.00
Oracle Cloud––––$0.00
DigitalOcean––––$0.00
Akamai Cloud (Linode)––––$0.00
Hetzner Cloud––––$0.00
Google Cloud$123$20.48$18.40$230$392
Microsoft Azure$80.39–$98.55$230$409
AWS$83.16$40.96$98.55$230$453

How is cloud data transfer billed?

monthly = tiered(internet egress) + CDN delivery + misses × origin fetch + inter-region GB × rate + cross-AZ GB × rate + NAT gateways × hourly × 730 + NAT GB × processing rate

This page uses the same method as the Cloud Egress Cost Calculator, which explains each term and assumption in full.

Worked example

Six private-subnet servers in three availability zones, a NAT gateway in each zone, sending 5 TB a month of image pulls and third-party API calls through NAT.

  1. 1Internet egress: $83.16
  2. 2Cross-AZ: $40.96
  3. 3NAT gateway hours: $98.55
  4. 4NAT data processed: $230
  5. 5Total: $453 a month

$453 a month on AWS, $5,437 a year. The cheapest cloud listed that runs servers, Oracle Cloud, would cost $0.00 a month.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cut NAT gateway data processing charges?

Route AWS service traffic around the gateway. S3 and DynamoDB gateway endpoints are free and remove that traffic from NAT entirely; interface endpoints for ECR, CloudWatch and other services cost $0.01 per GB, less than NAT processing. Use a pull-through cache for container images, and keep a NAT gateway in each zone so traffic does not also pay cross-AZ charges on its way out.

Is one NAT gateway per availability zone worth it?

Usually. Each extra gateway costs about $33 a month in hourly charges, but a single shared gateway sends every other zone's outbound traffic across zones at $0.01 per GB each way, and becomes a single point of failure. Past about 1.6 TB a month of NAT traffic per zone, the cross-AZ fees alone cost more than a second gateway.

Sources

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