The AWS NAT Gateway cost most founders never see on their bill

On a recent AWS bill review, the NAT Gateway line was about 50% higher than the EC2 instances it served. The team had no idea what a NAT Gateway was. A developer set it up two years earlier so private instances could reach the internet, and it had been billing data transfer charges ever since.

Why it adds up

A NAT Gateway costs $0.045 per GB of data processed. That sounds trivial until your application is pulling dependencies, syncing external data, or shipping logs to an outside service at scale.

Most founders never look past the EC2 line on their AWS bill. NAT Gateway, data transfer, CloudFront egress and PrivateLink are where the surprises hide.

What we changed

We moved their logging to VPC endpoints and cut the external traffic routed through the gateway. The NAT Gateway cost dropped by about 85%.

The bill is still ugly to read. But at least it is accurate now.

Where to look

If you have never looked at the Data Transfer section of your AWS bill, this week is the right time to start.