This topic describes the billable items and pricing of Application Load Balancer (ALB).

Billable items of ALB

ALB supports the pay-as-you-go billing method. Total fees for an ALB instance: instance fee, Load Balancer Capacity Unit (LCU) fee, and fee for data transfer over the Internet.

Network type Instance fee LCU fee Fee for data transfer over the Internet
Internet-facing Charged Charged Charged
Internal-facing Charged Charged N/A

Instance fee

You are charged an instance fee on an hourly basis. If an ALB instance is used for less than 1 hour, the usage duration is rounded up to 1 hour. You are charged an instance fee from when the ALB instance is created to when it is released.

Note The prices in the following table are provided only for reference. For more information about the actual prices, visit the buy page.
Edition Instance fee (USD/hour)
Basic 0.007
Standard 0.021

LCU fee

An LCU measures the dimensions in which ALB processes traffic.

The following table describes the dimensions.

Dimension Description LCU coefficient Formula
Number of new connections The number of new connections per second. 25 connections per second Number of new connections/25
Number of concurrent connections The number of active connections per minute. 3,000 connections per minute Number of concurrent connections/3,000
Data transfer The data transfer over HTTP and HTTPS processed by ALB. Unit: GB. 1 GB per hour Data transfer/1
Number of rule evaluations The product of the number of specific items processed by an ALB instance and queries per second (QPS). These items include forwarding rules, lines of code in AScript, and additional certificates.
  • If the number of items does not exceed the quota, the number of rule evaluations equals the QPS value.
  • If the number of items exceeds the quota, the number of rule evaluations is calculated by using the following formula: Number of rule evaluations = QPS × (Number of forwarding rules that exceed the quota + Number of lines of code in AScript that exceed the quota + Number of additional certificates that exceed the quota).
Notice
  • Forwarding rules, lines of code in AScript, and additional certificates have the same quota, which is 25. You are charged only for the number of items that exceed the quota.
  • Starting March 22, 2022, the free quota for forwarding rules is increased from 10 to 25.
  • The AScript feature of ALB is available only for users included in the whitelist. If you want to use AScript to configure forwarding rules, to be included in the whitelist. For more information, see Overview of AScript.
1,000 Number of rule evaluations/1,000

The number of LCUs that are consumed by an ALB instance per hour is calculated in the preceding dimensions. The highest number of LCUs consumed among the four dimensions is charged. 

LCU fee = max{Number of LCUs for new connections, Number of LCUs for concurrent connections, Number of LCUs for data transfer, Number of LCUs for rule evaluations} × LCU unit price
Note The prices in the following table are provided only for reference. For more information about the actual prices, visit the buy page.
Billable item LCU unit price (USD/LCU)
LCU 0.007

Billing example

Dimension Example Formula Number of LCUs consumed
Number of new connections per second 100 new connections per second. In this example, 100 new connections are established per second. Every 25 new connections consumes an LCU per second. The total number of LCUs used for new connections is:
100/25 = 4
 4
Number of concurrent connections per minute Every connection lasts 3 minutes. Four requests are sent through each connection per second. In this example, 100 new connections are established per second. The number of new connections per minute is:
100 × 60 = 6,000
The number of concurrent connections per minute is equal to the number of new connections within the last 3 minutes.
Concurrent connections per minute = 6,000 + 6,000 + 6,000 = 18,000
Every 3,000 concurrent connections consumes an LCU per minute. The total number of LCUs used for concurrent connections is:
18000/3000 = 6
 6
Data transfer per hour 1,000 KB per second. The data transfer processed per hour is:
1000 KB × 60 × 60 = 3,600,000 KB = 3.6 GB
One GB of data transfer consumes an LCU per hour. The total number of LCUs used for data transfer is:
3.6/1 = 3.6
 3.6
Number of rule evaluations per second
  • 30 forwarding rules.
  • 20 lines of code in AScript.
  • 32 additional certificates.
 One hundred new connections are established per second. Four requests are sent through each connection per second. The number of requests received per second is:
100 × 4 = 400
In this example, the number of forwarding rules and the number of additional certificates configured exceed the quota. The number of rule evaluations is:
[(30 - 25) + (32 - 25)] × 400 = 4,800
Every 1,000 rule evaluations consumes an LCU per second. The total number of LCUs used for rule evaluations is:
4800÷1000=4.8
 4.8

In this example, the concurrent connections consume the highest number of LCUs, which is 6. Therefore, the LCU fee for the ALB instance is calculated based on the number of concurrent connections. 

LCU fee per hour = USD 0.007/LCU × 6 = USD 0.042
LCU fee per month = USD 0.042 × 24 (hours) × 30 (days) = USD 30.24

You can use the LCU calculator to calculate the number of LCUs consumed by an ALB instance.

Use the LCU calculator

Fee for data transfer over the Internet

You are not charged for data transfer over the Internet if you use internal-facing ALB instances. You are charged for data transfer over the Internet only if you use Internet-facing ALB instances. Internet-facing ALB instances use elastic IP addresses (EIPs) to provide services over the Internet. If you use an Internet-facing ALB instance, you are charged an instance fee and a bandwidth fee or a data transfer fee for the EIP. For more information, see Pay-as-you-go.