# How much does a rack generate in AWS costs? Roughly

**URL:** <https://community.convox.com/t/how-much-does-a-rack-generate-in-aws-costs-roughly/662>\
**Category:** Rack (Version 2)\
**Created:** [November 29, 2019, 10:56pm UTC](https://community.convox.com/t/how-much-does-a-rack-generate-in-aws-costs-roughly/662 "2019-11-29T22:56:49Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![ziad](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/b782af/32.png) [@ziad](https://community.convox.com/u/ziad)\
**Post date:** [November 29, 2019, 10:56pm UTC](https://community.convox.com/t/how-much-does-a-rack-generate-in-aws-costs-roughly/662/1 "2019-11-29T22:56:49Z")

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I want to spin up a rack on my personal AWS account to experiment with and run some code for personal/occasional use. But will a rack generate a lot of AWS cost?

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**Author:** ![ziad](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/b782af/32.png) [@ziad](https://community.convox.com/u/ziad)\
**Post date:** [November 29, 2019, 11:00pm UTC](https://community.convox.com/t/how-much-does-a-rack-generate-in-aws-costs-roughly/662/2 "2019-11-29T23:00:18Z")

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From Cameron@Convox:

A standard Rack (ECS) running t2.small costs approximately $20-$30 a month to run. Obviously running more or larger instances + RDS databases etc… can significantly increase your AWS costs

An EKS Rack costs approximately $150 a month

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**Author:** ![ziad](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/b782af/32.png) [@ziad](https://community.convox.com/u/ziad)\
**Post date:** [November 29, 2019, 11:10pm UTC](https://community.convox.com/t/how-much-does-a-rack-generate-in-aws-costs-roughly/662/3 "2019-11-29T23:10:35Z")

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And… to minimize cost: “You can specify the RDS size following the instructions here: [https://docs.convox.com/use-cases/resources#mysql-postgres](https://docs.convox.com/use-cases/resources#mysql-postgres) . There is no way to turn down the Rack infrastructure. You can however use spot instances which can save you some money: [https://docs.convox.com/reference/rack-parameters#spotinstancebid](https://docs.convox.com/reference/rack-parameters#spotinstancebid)”

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**Author:** ![crohr](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/community.convox.com/crohr/32/29_2.png) [@crohr](https://community.convox.com/u/crohr)\
**Post date:** [December 5, 2019, 9:13am UTC](https://community.convox.com/t/how-much-does-a-rack-generate-in-aws-costs-roughly/662/4 "2019-12-05T09:13:23Z")

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Minimum cost is as follows (for ECS-based rack):

- 3 x runtime EC2 instances (say 3 t3.small). 3 is the minimum required, and at least one of them must be on-demand.
- [optional] 1 x build EC2 instance (t3.micro can work)
- EBS space (minimum 30GB per instance)
- 1 ALB
- [optional, but enabled by default] 1 ELB for the API
- CloudWatch logs - free up to 5GB
- CloudWatch detailed metrics for the EC2 instances: ~13$
- 1 private Route53 zone: 0.5$

Assuming you will go with the bare minimum in terms of hardware i.e. 1 ALB + 3 t3.small (1 on-demand + 2 spot instances), no build instance (images will get built on the runtime instances), you would get (roughly): 16$ (ALB) + 1 \* 16$ + 2 \* 5$ (EC2) + 10$ (EBS)~= 52$/month. To that you add the detailed metrics and Route53 zone so 52+13+0.5 ~= **66$/month** for the rack only.

It is unfortunate that detailed monitoring can’t be switched off since it represents ~20% of the rack cost for small racks (and it is pretty much useless in staging or personal racks). /cc @ddollar