A public IP now costs $3.65/mo. This isn't included in the EC2 price; it's not even shown in the AWS pricing calculator when estimating EC2 costs. It's hidden under VPC pricing.

That's a fairly substantial increase for small instance sizes. A t4g.small with the savings plan at around $9/mo will actually cost $13/mo — almost a 50% increase.

And there's no real way around it for most situations, especially small projects where that cost makes a difference.

Let's say you decide to use CloudFront and put your EC2 instance on a private subnet, no internet gateway or public IP. You can use EC2 Instance Connect Endpoint to SSH into your box, but good luck installing packages or pulling Docker images. You can't even connect to ECR without using AWS PrivateLink, which costs a bit over $7/mo.

And don't even think about a NAT Gateway; you'd think NAT would be cheaper than a dedicated IP, but AWS charges you $32.85/mo for what a crappy home router does.

The smallest DO droplet costs as much as an IP, and that's with 10 GB of storage (and an IP).

Is there something I'm missing here? Or is this just a new hidden fee and we have to accept it? It's already bad enough that you can't create an EC2 instance anymore without an EBS volume (another fee), but at least that's reasonably cheap. I know AWS has always been fees left and right, but it's starting to get egregious. You can't even have simple hotlink protection if you choose CloudFront without paying $6/mo, something that's free everywhere else.

Edit: Wow, this is really controversial, it seems.

Edit 2: I need to clarify a bit, because I think a lot of people reading this won't realize what's it's like for a new AWS user, or for someone like myself who's setting up AWS for the first time in 7-8 years.

When I first posted this, I didn't even realize IPv6 public IP was possible. It's not made clear in the console, either when launching an EC2 instance or when creating a VPC. IPv4 is the default for both, too. I think anyone would be forgiven for not knowing there's another way and just eating the automatic $4/mo cost.

And that's really the crux of the problem. It's not an opt-in extra charge like most AWS services. It's opt-out, and you have to know that you can even opt-out at all. And, like I said, for small, single-node applications, that $4/mo fee is a fairly significant % increase.

But the fact that some of you are supporting such hidden fees is, frankly, shameful. I think I'm done with reddit for a while. Y'all suck. Those who suggested v6 and shared your experience, thank you.

hey how much does it cost you for running an ec2 with a moderate number of requests. I have a ec2 with sql server running in docker in a t3 medium instance for a .Net application. I have no request coming as of now but the cost is like 3-4 $ each day. That would be painful for a small businesses. Is there a way to optimize. I did few rate limiting through nginx but cost changes were minimal. And also other aws managed service would be more expensive than manually handling.