Load balancer
A load balancer distributes incoming traffic across multiple instances, and cloud-managed load balancers bill an hourly base charge plus a capacity/throughput fee.
Managed load balancers (AWS ALB/NLB, Azure Load Balancer, GCP Cloud Load Balancing) charge for every hour they exist plus a usage dimension based on processed connections, data, or capacity units. Idle or duplicate load balancers are a common small-but-steady waste item.
For low-traffic services the hourly base charge can dominate, so consolidating services behind a shared load balancer often reduces cost.
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