Cloud pricing term
What is a minimum billable duration?
Minimum billable duration is the shortest amount of runtime a provider charges for each start, even when the work finishes sooner.
The expensive mistake
Multiplying measured one-second work by the per-second rate while ignoring a 60-second minimum. Short, frequent jobs can cost many times more than their useful runtime suggests.
Where it appears on your bill
It is folded into task or instance duration, usually after rounding each execution separately rather than aggregating all seconds first.
Worked example
At the recorded Fargate Linux/x86 rates for 1 vCPU and 2 GB, one second nominally costs $0.000013714. The 60-second minimum makes the billed execution 60 x $0.000013714 = $0.00082284, exactly 60 times the one-second multiplication.
Example prices checked: