AWS VPC NAT Gateway Pricing: Real-World Examples

Abstract pricing pages are confusing. Let’s look at real monthly bills for AWS VPC NAT Gateways across three different company sizes.

Scenario A: The Lean Startup

Architecture: Single AZ (us-east-1), Dev environment. Traffic: Pulling Docker images, light API calls (50 GB/month).

Line Item	Usage	Cost
NAT Gateway Hours	730 Hours	$32.85
NAT Gateway Processing	50 GB	$2.25
Total		$35.10 / mo

Verdict: Affordable, but for a tiny startup, a NAT Instance could lower this to $4.

Scenario B: The Growing SaaS

Architecture: High Availability (2 AZs), Production traffic. Traffic: Heavy external API integrations (2 TB/month).

Line Item	Usage	Cost
NAT Gateway Hours	1460 Hours (2 x 730)	$65.70
NAT Gateway Processing	2,048 GB	$92.16
Total		$157.86 / mo

Verdict: The processing fee is starting to exceed the hourly fee. It is time to optimize traffic paths (e.g., using VPC Endpoints).

Scenario C: The Big Data Corp

Architecture: Full Redundancy (3 AZs), Data ingestion pipelines. Traffic: 50 TB of data passing through to external vendors.

Line Item	Usage	Cost
NAT Gateway Hours	2190 Hours (3 x 730)	$98.55
NAT Gateway Processing	51,200 GB	$2,304.00
Total		$2,402.55 / mo

Verdict: DANGER. The processing fee is massive. This architecture needs review. Moving distinct heavy flows to Direct Connect or PrivateLink could save thousands.

Takeaway

The “Hourly” price is just the entry ticket. The “Processing” price is the trap.

[!TIP] Are you Scenario A, B, or C? Model your traffic volume on our NAT Gateway Cost Page to see your forecasted spend.