I'm building a deployment tool and comparing costs across many small applications. For a typical lightly used Node.js app in a development environment in us-east-1, the monthly bill looks roughly like this: ALB $17.01, public IPv4 addresses $14.60, Fargate compute $5.41, data transfer $1.80, and observability $0.06, for a total of $38.88.
That means compute is only about 14% of the bill, while the load balancer and public IPv4 charges make up about 82%. Those costs are mostly fixed and apply even when the app receives little or no traffic. With two containers, the IPv4 charges alone can add around $7 per month before the application serves a request.
The main cost-saving ideas I've found are sharing one ALB across multiple environments with host-based listener rules and removing public IPs from tasks that do not need to be directly reachable. Sharing the ALB seems to provide the biggest savings because it avoids paying for another load balancer per environment.
Am I overlooking any practical ways to reduce or avoid the IPv4-related costs, or are these simply unavoidable fixed costs for this architecture?
4 Answers
Putting a proxy such as Cloudflare in front can help you run the origin with IPv6-only connectivity, which may eliminate the public IPv4 address charge for the origin. You still need to check the rest of the design carefully, including whether the application or any dependencies require IPv4 and whether an ALB is still needed.
You’re not necessarily doing anything wrong. For a small deployment, the ALB and public IPv4 charges are largely fixed overhead, so they can easily dwarf the actual Fargate usage. Sharing an ALB across environments and keeping tasks private are the sensible first optimizations.
At this scale, comparing the whole setup with a simpler hosting platform is worthwhile. A managed app host or serverless option may bundle ingress and networking costs differently, even if the raw compute price is less transparent. AWS becomes more attractive when you need its networking, scaling, or operational controls.
If the service is tiny enough, you could avoid the load balancer entirely and expose a task directly, updating DNS when the task’s public address changes. That can work for a hobby app, but it gives up a lot of the reliability, stable routing, and deployment convenience that the ALB provides, so I’d treat it as a tradeoff rather than a general recommendation.
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