Deploy

Cost Estimation Patterns

Use the awspricing MCP server to get accurate cost estimates before generating IaC.

Workflow

1. Identify all AWS services in the architecture

2. Query pricing for each service

3. Calculate monthly estimates based on expected usage

4. Present total before proceeding

Service Codes

Fargate Pricing

Fargate charges per vCPU-hour and per GB-hour. Query with usagetype filters:

usagetype: "USE1-Fargate-vCPU-Hours:perCPU"  # vCPU pricing
usagetype: "USE1-Fargate-GB-Hours"           # Memory pricing

Typical small app (0.5 vCPU, 1GB):

• us-east-1: ~$18/month running 24/7

Aurora Serverless v2 Pricing

Aurora Serverless v2 charges per ACU-hour (Aurora Capacity Unit).

• Minimum: 0.5 ACU

• 1 ACU ≈ 2GB memory

Dev estimate (0.5-2 ACU range):

• ~$45-90/month depending on usage patterns

Production estimate (2-8 ACU range):

• ~$180-360/month depending on load

Amazon DocumentDB Serverless Pricing

Amazon DocumentDB Serverless charges per DCU-hour (DocumentDB Capacity Unit), storage (GB-month), and I/O (standard config only).

• Minimum: 0.5 DCU

• 1 DCU ≈ 2 GiB memory

Dev estimate (0.5-2 DCU range, 10GB storage):

• ~$35-120/month depending on usage patterns (scales to 0.5 DCU when idle)

Production estimate (2-8 DCU range, 100GB storage, multi-AZ):

• ~$130-400/month depending on load

Elastic Beanstalk Pricing

Elastic Beanstalk itself has no service fee. Cost equals the underlying AWS resources provisioned for the environment (EC2, ELB, EBS, CloudWatch). Query awspricing MCP server for region-accurate estimates. Approximate us-east-1 pricing:

Dev web (1x t3.small + ALB): ~$35-40/month Dev worker (1x t3.small, no ALB): ~$15-20/month Production web (4x t3.medium + ALB, Multi-AZ): ~$150-200/month

Include EBS volume costs (8GB gp3 default: ~$1/month per instance).

Beanstalk Cluster mode (managed EKS)

Cluster mode has a different and higher cost floor than Standard mode, so a Standard-vs-Cluster comparison that prices only the EKS cluster, the nodes, and the ALB understates it. Price all of these:

Two of these are the ones that get missed. The custom metrics are a new line item rather than a bigger one — Standard mode publishes to AWS/ElasticBeanstalk, which CloudWatch provides free, while Cluster mode publishes per replica to paid custom namespaces. And the log groups accumulate indefinitely, gaining a new set of streams on every deployment, until someone sets retention.

Only the cluster hour is shared across environments. Everything else is per workload, so a second service on an existing cluster is cheaper than the first but not close to free. A single small service usually costs more in Cluster mode than the same service on one EC2 instance in Standard mode; the economics improve with the number of services sharing the cluster. Say so when presenting the comparison.

Quick Reference Estimates

Small web app (Fargate + Aurora Serverless v2 + ALB):

• Dev: ~$70-100/month

• Production: ~$200-400/month

Small web app (Fargate + Amazon DocumentDB Serverless + ALB):

• Dev: ~$70-155/month

• Production: ~$200-450/month

Static site / SPA (Amplify Hosting):

• Low traffic: ~$0-5/month (free tier covers most small sites)

• High traffic: ~$15-40/month

Static site (S3 + CloudFront):

• Low traffic: ~$1-5/month

• High traffic: ~$20-50/month

Serverless API (Lambda + API Gateway + DynamoDB):

• Low traffic: ~$5-20/month

• High traffic: scales with requests

Web app on Elastic Beanstalk:

• Dev (1x t3.small + ALB): ~$35-40/month

• Production (load-balanced, Multi-AZ): ~$80-200/month

Web app on EB + Aurora Serverless v2:

• Dev: ~$80-130/month

• Production: ~$200-400/month

Presenting Estimates

Always show:

1. Per-service breakdown

2. Monthly total

3. Key assumptions (e.g., "assumes 24/7 uptime", "assumes 1M requests/month")

4. Cost optimization tips if relevant