Five of AWS's most surprising bill line items: NAT Gateway, S3 egress, CDN, EC2 RI, and Lambda vs Fargate. Plug in your usage to see what each actually costs and where the waste hides. Browser-only math, no signup, 2026 published rates.
Both line items charge per-GB on top of fixed fees, and neither shows up in the AWS console as a single rolled-up number. NAT Gateway adds $0.045/hr per AZ ($1.08/day per AZ before any data moves) and $0.045 per GB processed; teams running three-AZ HA architectures often pay $97/month in fixed hourly fees before the first byte is processed. S3 egress is tiered by destination: same-region EC2 is free, cross-region runs $0.02/GB, and internet egress runs $0.05-$0.09/GB depending on volume. A backup workflow that copies a 500GB dataset to another region monthly is a $120/year line item most teams never investigate.
For full-architecture estimates spanning EC2 + RDS + ELB + many services at once, use the official AWS Pricing Calculator. It is the most accurate option for net-new architectures because Amazon maintains it directly. The tradeoff is interface complexity: it asks for inputs most teams cannot supply accurately (sustained CPU utilization, IOPS distribution, baseline vs burst). The 3 calculators here focus on the line items the official tool buries inside service estimators: NAT, egress, and CDN. Use both: AWS Pricing Calculator for the full bill, these calculators for the line items where waste hides.
Yes. AWS publishes the canonical rates in three places: the per-service pricing page, the AWS Price List Bulk API, and the Pricing Calculator UI. My recurring schedule reads the per-service pricing pages and reconciles them with the Bulk API on a 24-hour cadence. When AWS changes a published rate (which happens 4-8 times per year for the services covered), the calculator updates within 24 hours of the change going live.
Three deliberate differences. (1) Decision focus: each calculator answers one question (should I reduce AZs? is CloudFront cheaper than direct egress? is Cloudflare cheaper than CloudFront?), not "price out my entire architecture". (2) Scenario columns: every calculator shows the current cost next to 2-3 alternative architectures, so the savings number is one click away, not derived manually. (3) Browser-only math: nothing transmits, no AWS account needed, no signup. The official calculator is better for new-architecture pricing. These are better for finding waste in an existing architecture.
No. The calculators run entirely in the browser. No spend values, traffic volumes, or architecture details are transmitted to a server. Only anonymous pageview and CTA-click pings are recorded (page path + event name, no PII). There is no signup, no email gate, no account. If you want a deeper audit using your actual AWS Cost and Usage Report, that is a paid product (see LLM Bill Triage upsell) where the CSV is processed in-memory and discarded immediately after PDF delivery.