ECS Fargate Cost Calculator: the line item nobody on your team can quote.
Drop in your fleet shape. The math uses published AWS rates (us-east-1, Linux/x86, on-demand) and shows the 24/7 baseline against a Mon–Fri 9-to-7 schedule.
How much are you paying for environments nobody's using right now?
Adjust the sliders to match your fleet. Numbers update live using published AWS Fargate rates (us-east-1, Linux/x86).
How often do your dev/staging environments actually need to run?
Fortem starts at $790/month. Fortem starts at $790/month — it pays for itself in month one.
Your fleet is burning $1,215/mo right now.
Want us to verify this against your real AWS bill and show you exactly which environments are idle?
Show the math
All rates from AWS Fargate pricing page (us-east-1, Linux/x86, on-demand):
Baseline monthly cost (24/7, on-demand):
12 envs × 8 services × (0.5 vCPU × $0.04048 + 1 GB × $0.004445) × 730 hrs
= $1,730 / month
Schedule multiplier:
50 hrs ÷ 168 hrs/week = 29.8%
Optimized monthly cost:
$1,730 × 29.8% = $515/mo
Monthly savings:
$1,730 − $515 = $1,215/mo
Months to recoup Fortem plan ($790/month):
⌈$790 ÷ 1,215⌉ = 1 month
Compute-only — fixed overhead (ALB, NAT, CloudWatch ≈ ~$90/env) stays even when tasks stop. Full breakdown → That's why we say 60–70%, not 90%.
A week has 168 hours.
Your team works 40 of them.
You're paying for the other 128 hours. See exactly how much ↓
Rates verified May 2026 from the AWS Fargate pricing page. Savings shown are for scheduling only — right-sizing and Fargate Spot add on top. Fixed overhead (ALB ~$22/mo, NAT ~$32, CloudWatch ~$36 ≈ ~$90/mo per environment) stays even when tasks stop. See our cost optimization guide for the full breakdown.
How to calculate ECS Fargate costs
Fargate pricing is two line items: vCPU and memory, billed per hour. There's no per-instance charge and no ECS control-plane fee — you pay for the exact CPU and RAM your tasks reserve, for every hour they run. The whole bill for a fleet collapses into one formula:
envs × services × (vCPU × $0.04048 + GB × $0.004445) × 730Read it left to right: count your environments (each prod, staging, and dev copy of the stack), multiply by the services running in each, then price one service-hour from its vCPU and memory reservation. Multiply by 730 — the hours in an average month — for the 24/7 figure. Fargate reserves CPU and memory in fixed tiers: vCPU comes in 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16, and each vCPU tier allows a specific memory range (0.5 vCPU pairs with 1–4 GB; 1 vCPU with 2–8 GB; and so on). Pick the smallest tier that fits the task — you pay for what you reserve, not what you use.
Worked example: a 0.5 vCPU / 1 GB dev service costs (0.5 × $0.04048 + 1 × $0.004445) × 730 ≈ $17/mo running 24/7. For the rates behind every number here, see the real cost of AWS Fargate pricing.
What drives your ECS Fargate bill
Three things move the number. First, the vCPU and memory tiers: a 1 vCPU / 2 GB service costs roughly four times a 0.25 vCPU / 0.5 GB one, so over-provisioned task definitions compound across every environment that clones them. Second, the 24/7 tax — Fargate bills by the hour, and a non-prod service left running through nights and weekends spends ~76% of its life serving nobody. Multiply that idle time across 10+ environments and it's the single largest avoidable cost in a typical fleet.
Third, fixed per-environment overhead the calculator deliberately holds aside: an Application Load Balancer (~$22/mo), a NAT Gateway (~$32/mo), and CloudWatch logs and metrics (~$36/mo) add up to roughly ~$90/mo per environment — and most of it keeps billing even when every task is stopped. That floor is why honest scheduling savings land at 60–70%, not 90%. CloudWatch in particular sneaks up as log volume grows; we break it down in the guide to CloudWatch costs on ECS.
If your dev environments are the line item under scrutiny, the breakdown in what an AWS dev environment really costs pairs the per-service math with the overhead floor.
How much scheduling saves
A week has 168 hours. Your team works about 40 of them. A dev environment that runs only during business hours — Mon–Fri, 9am–7pm — is up for roughly 50 hours a week, about 24% of the calendar. The other 76% is pure idle compute you can stop without anyone noticing. That alone is where the 60–70% reduction comes from: you're no longer paying for nights, weekends, and holidays on environments nobody touches outside the workday.
Scheduling is the biggest single lever because it's pure subtraction from the most expensive line — running compute. Stack Fargate Spot on top of the scheduled hours and you take another ~70% off the on-demand rate. The compounding is why a fleet running 24/7 on-demand and the same fleet scheduled-plus-Spot can differ by an order of magnitude. For the playbook that doesn't require Reserved Instances or Savings Plans, see how to reduce AWS costs without Reserved Instances.
Doing it by hand means starting and stopping dozens of services across every environment, twice a day, without forgetting any. That's the operations problem Fortem solves — see your real numbers in the calculator above, then book a 20-minute call to talk through scheduling your fleet.
Frequently asked questions
How much does an AWS ECS Fargate environment cost per month?
A typical dev service (0.5 vCPU, 1 GB) costs ~$17/mo running 24/7. A staging environment with 8 services runs ~$137/mo. At 12 environments around the clock, non-prod Fargate spend reaches $1,600+/mo before ALB, NAT, and CloudWatch overhead.
How is AWS Fargate pricing calculated?
Fargate bills $0.04048 per vCPU-hour and $0.004445 per GB-hour, across 730 hours/month (us-east-1, Linux/x86, on-demand). Cost = environments × services × (vCPU × $0.04048 + GB × $0.004445) × 730.
How much can I save by scheduling ECS environments?
A week has 168 hours; most teams use dev/staging ~40. Stopping environments nights and weekends (Mon–Fri 9am–7pm ≈ 50 hrs/week) cuts compute 60–70%. Fargate Spot stacks another ~70% off on top.
Does stopping a Fargate task stop all costs?
No. Compute stops, but fixed per-environment overhead — ALB (~$22/mo), NAT (~$32), CloudWatch (~$36), roughly ~$90/mo — keeps running. That's why realistic savings are 60–70%, not 90%.
What's the cheapest way to run ECS Fargate dev environments?
Right-size tasks, schedule them to business hours, and run dev/staging on Fargate Spot. Scheduling alone is the biggest single lever; the calculator above shows the dollar impact of each.