Load balancing
Each provider is profiled from its own pricing page, with the source recorded against every figure. No two of these charge for the same thing — an hour, a forwarding rule, a node, or a flat monthly add-on — so the column that matters is not the price but what the price counts, and next to it what each one commits to keeping up.
Load balancing
| Provider | Entry paid plan | Published SLA | What is metered |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS Elastic Load Balancing | $0.0225 per load balancer-hour in us-east-1, charged for partial hours too, plus capacity units on top. There is no plan and no free allowance for the balancer itself — it bills from the hour it exists, whether traffic arrives or not. | 99.99% monthly uptime for a Multi-AZ Load Balancer — one spread across two or more availability zones. A balancer in a single zone is not covered by that commitment. | Per load balancer-hour plus per capacity-unit-hour, and the capacity rate depends on which balancer you run: $0.008 per LCU-hour for an Application Load Balancer, $0.006 for a Network Load Balancer, and $0.008 per GB processed on the older Classic balancers. Reserving capacity in advance is cheaper per unit than using it on demand. |
| Cloudflare Load Balancing | From $5 a month, sold as an add-on activated on an existing Cloudflare plan rather than as a standalone service. The cheapest entry in this category. | Not documented | A monthly add-on price on top of a Cloudflare plan, not a meter. Nothing here is billed per hour, per rule or per node — the distinction from the three cloud-native balancers, all of which charge for the resource existing. |
| DigitalOcean Load Balancers | $12 a month for a regional load balancer with one node. The only member of this category priced monthly rather than hourly, and the only one where the entry price is a round number rather than a fraction of a cent. | Not documented | Per node, added and removed as you go, up to 100 of them. Each node is a fixed quantum of capacity rather than a meter, so the bill steps rather than tracking traffic — which makes it forecastable in a way per-hour and per-GB pricing is not, and wasteful if a node sits half-used. |
| Google Cloud Load Balancing | $0.025 per hour for each of the first five forwarding rules, then $0.01 an hour for every rule after that — so the sixth rule costs 60% less than the fifth. Regional data processing is charged on top. | 99.99% monthly uptime. The load balancing commitment lives inside the Compute Engine SLA rather than on a page of its own — cloud.google.com/load-balancing/sla redirects there. | Per forwarding rule per hour, with an inverted volume curve: the first five rules are the expensive ones at $0.025 an hour and everything beyond is $0.01. Data processing is charged by the region that handles the traffic, and there are no global data processing charges. |
Which to consider
Balancing traffic that already lives in AWS, where the balancer reaches EC2, containers, Lambda and IP targets natively. $0.0225 an hour plus capacity, billed only on whichever dimension you actually use most rather than on all of them at once.
Balancing across clouds you do not own. It is the only member here that markets balancing between AWS, GCP, Azure and on-premise servers, and at $5 a month it is also the cheapest entry.
Knowing the bill in advance. $12 a month buys one node and a node is a fixed 10,000 requests per second — capacity that steps rather than meters, which is the only genuinely forecastable pricing in this category.
More than five forwarding rules. The price curve inverts at that point: the first five cost $0.025 an hour each and every rule after is $0.01, so the sixth is 60% cheaper than the fifth and the marginal cost keeps falling.