AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ALB/NLB) Hidden Costs 2026
What they don't show you on the pricing page
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ALB/NLB) costs $0.02 to $0.02 per per month (varies by usage) as of June 2026, with 4 plans available. Pricing depends on your chosen tier, contract length, and negotiated discounts.
Use the interactive pricing calculator to estimate your exact cost based on team size and requirements.
- Free tier: No free tier available
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ALB/NLB) offers 4 pricing tiers: Application Load Balancer (ALB), Network Load Balancer (NLB), Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB), Classic Load Balancer. The Network Load Balancer (NLB) plan is high-performance tcp/udp workloads.
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ALB/NLB) true cost runs 70% above the listed $0.0225-$0.0225/per month (varies by usage) price as of June 2026. For a 25-person team, expect ~$11 in year-one costs vs the $6.75 base license. Key hidden costs: load balancer capacity units (lcu) charged per dimension: new connections, active connections, processed bytes, rule evaluations, lcu costs vary by region (typically $0.008 per lcu-hour in us regions), data transfer charges for traffic processed through load balancer. Verified from 1 sources by CostBench.
Example: True Cost for 25 Users
| License (25 × $0.0225 × 12) | $6.75/yr |
| Implementation (one-time) | +$15,000–$50,000 |
| Premium Support (20%) | +$1/yr |
| Training (25 × $500) | +$12,500 |
| Admin (part-time) | +$15,000–$25,000/yr |
| Estimated Year 1 Total | ~$11 |