AWS NAT Gateway Can Cost More Than Your Entire EC2 Bill — Here's the Fix

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AWS NAT gateways charge $0.045 per hour per availability zone plus $0.045 per GB of data processed, meaning a multi-AZ production workload pushing 10 TB per month can rack up over $1,400 in NAT costs alone — often exceeding the compute bill. The core problem is that traffic between private subnets and AWS services like S3, ECR, and Secrets Manager is routed through the NAT gateway by default, generating unnecessary data-processing fees. The most impactful fix is enabling VPC endpoints: gateway endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB are free, while interface endpoints for other AWS services charge $0.01 per GB instead of $0.045, breaking even at roughly 700 GB per month. For outbound IPv6 traffic, AWS's egress-only internet gateway is free and carries no data-processing or hourly fees, yet remains widely underutilized. Teams are advised to audit which traffic actually needs NAT and reroute internal AWS service calls through endpoints as a first step to significantly reducing cloud costs.

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