Cloud pricing term
What is 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. No positive load-balancer price has been verified in the current price set, so a Kubernetes total that shows only workers and control plane is a known floor.
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 totals $22.42/month before data transfer. AWS also prices public IPv4 at $0.005/hour, and one load balancer can use two addresses. Using this site's 730-hour month, two addresses add 2 x $0.005 x 730 = $7.30, making $29.72 before transfer. The EKS control plane would add another $73.
Example prices checked: