Tools: Latest Solved: Why Nat Gateway Is So Expensive? 2026

Posted on Feb 10

• Originally published at wp.me

TL;DR: AWS NAT Gateway bills are often unexpectedly high due to the data processing charge, not the hourly rate, impacting traffic like S3 transfers and OS updates from private subnets. To drastically reduce these costs, implement free Gateway VPC Endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB, utilize Interface Endpoints for other AWS services, and consider architectural changes like managed proxies or eliminating unnecessary outbound internet access.

AWS NAT Gateway bills can be a shocking surprise. Learn why these gateways are so expensive and discover three practical, real-world solutions—from quick VPC Endpoint fixes to long-term architectural changes—to slash your cloud costs for good.

I still remember the Monday morning meeting. The Director of Engineering slid a printout of the latest AWS bill across the table, his finger resting on a single line item. “Darian,” he said, “explain this to me.” The line was ‘NAT Gateway – Data Processing’, and the number next to it was just shy of $9,000. My stomach dropped. It turned out a new analytics service, running on a fleet of EC2 instances in a private subnet, was pulling multi-terabyte datasets from S3 every single day. The S3 data transfer cost? Zero. The cost to route that “free” data through our NAT Gateway? A small fortune. That was the day I stopped treating NAT Gateways as a simple “set it and forget it” utility and started treating them like the ticking cost bombs they can be.

Everyone gets hung up on the hourly charge for a NAT Gateway, but that’s rarely the problem. As of this writing, it’s about $0.045 per hour, which comes out to roughly $33 a month. That’s pocket change. The real damage comes from the Data Processing charge. AWS bills another $0.045 for every gigabyte of data that passes through the gateway. Think about what your private instances do:

That data adds up fast. If your prod-db-01 instance sends 500GB of backups to S3 through a NAT Gateway, you just spent an extra $22.50 you didn’t need to. Now multiply that across a fleet of servers, and you see how we ended up with a $9k bill.

Look, you can’t just turn off the internet for your private resources. But you can be a lot smarter about how you provide it. Here are the three levels of solutions we use at TechResolve.

If your biggest cost driver is traffic to S3 or DynamoDB, this is your solution. Stop reading, go do this now. A Gateway VPC Endpoint creates a private route

Source: Dev.to