What does AWS actually cost per month?
A small production application — two t3.medium instances, a db.t3.medium database, S3, a load balancer and moderate transfer — lands around $220 to $320 a month. A single-instance staging environment can run under $50. A high-traffic platform with Multi-AZ and heavy egress runs into thousands.
The instance cost is the part everyone estimates correctly. The bill is usually larger than expected because of the supporting cast: load balancers, NAT gateways, data transfer and snapshots.
The line items that surprise people
- NAT Gateway — about $33 a month before any traffic, then $0.045 per gigabyte processed on top. For a small app this can cost more than the servers it serves. VPC endpoints or a NAT instance are cheaper at low scale.
- Data transfer out — $0.09 per GB after the first 100 GB. Inbound is free, outbound is not. Serving media directly from EC2 rather than CloudFront is a common and expensive mistake.
- Application Load Balancer — roughly $23 a month for the hours plus capacity units, regardless of how little traffic it carries.
- Multi-AZ RDS doubles the database bill. It buys automatic failover, which production databases usually need — but not staging.
How to cut an AWS bill
- Buy Savings Plans or Reserved Instances. A one-year commitment on steady-state compute saves roughly 40%. If a workload has run for six months, it is not a variable cost — stop paying on-demand for it.
- Put CloudFront in front of everything. Cheaper per gigabyte than direct transfer, and it reduces load on your origin.
- Turn off non-production overnight. Staging that runs 8 hours on weekdays instead of 24/7 costs a quarter as much.
- Set S3 lifecycle rules. Move anything older than 90 days to Infrequent Access or Glacier.
- Delete orphaned resources. Unattached EBS volumes, old snapshots and idle load balancers bill forever and belong to nobody.
AWS or something simpler?
AWS is the right answer when you need control, compliance, specific regions or scale. It is the wrong answer when you have no one to operate it — an unmanaged AWS account is a second job, and the cost of the person exceeds the cost of the servers for most small products.
For early-stage products, Firebase or a managed platform usually costs less all-in once you count the operational time. We help teams pick between them as part of backend development and infrastructure work.