The Complete Guide to Cloud Networking Costs: VPCs, NAT Gateways & Data Transfer

The Complete Guide to Cloud Networking Costs: VPCs, NAT Gateways & Data Transfer Most teams discover their networking bill late. Compute shows up in cost dashboards. Storage has clear metrics. Networking hides inside line items like "EC2 - Other" until someone investigates. By then, the bill has been high for months. This is a practical breakdown of how AWS networking pricing works, where the money actually goes, and which optimizations deliver the highest return for the least effort. What You're Actually Paying For The first thing to understand is the split between free and paid components. Free: Creating a VPC, subnets, route tables, internet gateways Security groups and network ACLs Data transfer within the same AZ using private IPs (including across VPC peers) Gateway VPC Endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB (no hourly charge, no data fee) Inbound data transfer from the internet to AWS Paid: Component Cost NAT Gateway $0.045/hr + $0.045/GB Public IPv4 address $0.005/hr (~$3.65/month p