Cheaper Alternatives to AWS NAT Gateway for Dev Clusters

For production, AWS NAT Gateway is perfect. It’s redundant, managed, and high-performance. For a development cluster that runs 4 pods, paying $32/month (or $98 for HA) is overkill.

Here are 3 cheaper ways to get internet access for your private subnets.

1. The “Public Subnet” Hack (Free)

If your dev resources don’t strictly need to be private, put them in a Public Subnet and give them Public IPs.

• Cost: $0 (Data transfer only).
• Security: Restrict Inbound traffic to 0.0.0.0/0 via Security Groups. Only allow response traffic.

2. The NAT Instance (Cheap)

Spin up a t4g.nano EC2 instance, disable “Source/Dest Check”, and run a simple iptables masquerade script.

• Cost: ~$3.00 / month.
• Pros: 90% cheaper than NAT Gateway.
• Cons: You manage it. If it crashes, internet breaks.
• Tool: Check out fck-nat (a popular Terraform module) to automate this.

3. IPv6-Only Subnets (Future)

IPv6 does not need NAT. Every resource gets a global address. Egress-Only Internet Gateways (EIGW) are free.

• Cost: $0.
• Pros: The “correct” architectural solution.
• Cons: Your application and VPC must support IPv6 fully.

Summary

Solution	Monthly Fixed Cost	Reliability
NAT Gateway	$32.85	99.99%
NAT Instance	~$3.00	It depends on you
IPv6 EIGW	$0.00	99.99%

[!NOTE] Calculate the difference. See exactly how much “Option 2” saves you over a year with our NAT Gateway Alternatives Calculator.