Idle AWS Load Balancers Cost Up to $18/Month Each — Here Is How to Find and Remove Them

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AWS Application and Network Load Balancers incur a fixed base charge of roughly $16–$18 per month regardless of whether they handle any traffic. Load balancers are often created early in a project's lifecycle but rarely deleted when the associated services are shut down, leaving orphaned resources that continue billing. Developers can identify idle load balancers by checking CloudWatch request metrics over a seven-day window and inspecting target group health via the AWS CLI. A load balancer showing near-zero requests, no healthy targets, and no DNS references pointing to it is generally safe to delete. Before removing any load balancer, teams should verify it is not serving a low-traffic but critical purpose such as a disaster-recovery endpoint or an internal admin panel.

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