Cloud pricing term
What does a load balancer cost?
Load balancer cost is the recurring and usage-based price of the managed network service that distributes traffic across backends.
The expensive mistake
Adding only the hourly load-balancer fee. A managed load balancer can also charge for processing units, data transfer, and public IPv4 addresses. A Kubernetes total that shows only workers and the control plane is a floor: the load balancer and its usage come on top.
Where it appears on your bill
Expect separate hours, capacity-unit or rule-unit usage, data-processing, transfer, and public-IP lines depending on the provider.
Worked example
AWS's low-usage Application Load Balancer example costs $0.03114/hour before data transfer, which AWS shows as $22.42 for a 30-day month. AWS also prices public IPv4 at $0.005/hour, and one load balancer can use two addresses. Over this site's 730-hour month, (0.03114 + 2 x 0.005) x 730 = $30.03 before transfer. The EKS control plane would add another $73.
Example prices checked: