Idle or low-traffic load balancers
A load balancer bills by the hour from the moment it exists. One with no healthy target — or almost no requests — pays the full hour to distribute nothing.
What this problem is
An ALB or NLB carries an hourly base charge that runs for as long as it exists, plus a charge for capacity units consumed. The hourly part is what hurts on dormant balancers: it does not depend on there being traffic, a registered target, or a healthy one.
The clearest case is the balancer routing to nothing. The service behind it was decommissioned, the Auto Scaling group was zeroed, the instances were terminated — and the balancer stayed, with an empty target group or every target unhealthy, billing the hour to return an error to anyone who finds it.
The less obvious case is the healthy balancer that barely receives requests. It works, it has live targets, it responds correctly — and it serves a few dozen requests a day. There the hourly base charge is several times larger than the value the balancing delivers, and the usual answer is consolidating several low-traffic services behind one shared balancer, with host- or path-based routing rules.
How we detect it
We list balancers with DescribeLoadBalancers, target groups with DescribeTargetGroups, and each target's state with DescribeTargetHealth — that is what separates "no healthy target" from "working". For volume, we read the request count the balancer publishes to CloudWatch.
- Load balancers routing to nothing
- Low-traffic load balancers
What it costs
An Application Load Balancer runs about $0.0225 per hour — roughly $16 a month in base charge alone — plus LCU consumption. A Network Load Balancer sits in a similar range (us-east-1).
Public AWS list prices, us-east-1, subject to change. The figure in your report is computed against your resources in your regions.
How it appears in the report
An illustrative example, with invented resources and figures. In the report each finding carries the real resource, its region, and the fix command where a safe one exists.
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