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AWS Fargate pricing calculator
A monthly Fargate bill split into vCPU, memory and extra storage, for tasks on x86 or Arm (Graviton), with what the same service would cost on the other one.
What does a small always-on Fargate service cost? (US East, Linux, prices checked 2026-10-17)
Two tasks of 0.5 vCPU and 1 GB running all month (730 hours each) cost $36.04 on x86: $29.55 for the vCPU and $6.49 for the memory. The same two tasks on Arm cost $28.84. The load balancer in front of them, NAT gateway traffic and CloudWatch Logs are separate lines and often cost more than the tasks.
Estimated monthly Fargate bill
$0
US East (N. Virginia), Linux, from aws.amazon.com/fargate/pricing and the AWS Price List API, checked 2026-10-17: x86 $0.04048 per vCPU-hour and $0.004445 per GB-hour of memory; Arm $0.03238 and $0.00356; extra ephemeral storage $0.000111 per GB-hour above the 20 GB every task gets. Billed per second with a 1-minute minimum. Load balancers, NAT gateways, data transfer, CloudWatch Logs and ECR storage are not included.
Why the Fargate line grows
Fargate charges for what a task reserves, not what it uses. A task sized at 1 vCPU and 2 GB that idles at 5% CPU all night pays for the full vCPU and both gigabytes for every second it runs. So the bill is set by two choices: how big each task is, and how many of them stay up when nobody is using the app.
The task size is usually copied from a tutorial and never revisited. Look at CloudWatch Container Insights for a week before you change anything: if CPU sits under 20% and memory under half, the next size down is the cheapest fix you will find. Sizes come in fixed pairs, so 0.5 vCPU can have 1 to 4 GB but not 6, which is why the calculator flags an invalid combination.
Always-on is the other half. Staging and preview environments that run 730 hours a month cost as much as production. Scaling them to zero at night and on weekends cuts their line by about two thirds, and ECS can do it with scheduled scaling.
Arm is about 20% cheaper on both vCPU and memory, and most Node, Python and Go images build for it with one extra flag. Fargate Spot is up to 70% off for tasks that can be interrupted, at a price AWS adjusts over time, so it suits workers and batch jobs rather than the web tier.
If the Fargate line on your bill is bigger than this page says it should be, or the load balancer and NAT gateway next to it are bigger still, send us the bill. We read it line by line for free.