How AWS NAT Gateway Quietly Doubles Your Cloud Bill — and How to Fix It
AWS NAT Gateway charges users twice: a fixed hourly fee of $0.045 per gateway and an additional $0.045 per GB of data processed, with standard data transfer costs layered on top. Many teams overlook the per-GB charge because it scales silently with traffic from routine tasks like container image pulls, S3 reads, and telemetry. Cross-availability-zone routing can further inflate costs when resources and NAT Gateways sit in different AZs, adding inter-AZ transfer fees. The most impactful free fix is enabling S3 and DynamoDB gateway endpoints, which routes heavy traffic away from NAT entirely and can be set up in minutes. Before making changes, AWS recommends using Cost Explorer and VPC Flow Logs to measure actual usage and identify the biggest sources of NAT-processed traffic.
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