Idle load balancers: the ~$16/month each you forgot to delete"

Short version: An Application or Network Load Balancer costs ~$0.0225/hour, about $16/month, just to exist , plus capacity units. Classic Load Balancers run ~$18/month. Load balancers outlive the services behind them: the app gets torn down, the ALB keeps billing. Here's how to find load balancers with no real traffic or no healthy targets, and remove them safely. Why idle load balancers linger The hourly base charge is fixed - an ALB with zero requests bills the same ~$16/month as a busy one. Load balancers are usually created early (with an app or an IaC module) and deleted last, if ever. A handful of abandoned ALBs from old environments is real, recurring money. Step 1 - List load balancers and their traffic aws elbv2 describe-load-balancers \ --query 'LoadBalancers[].{Name:LoadBalancerName,Type:Type,ARN:LoadBalancerArn}' \ --output table For an ALB, check request volume over the last 7 days (the metric dimension is the tail of the ARN, e.g. app/my-alb/50dc6c495c0c9188 ): aws cloudwatch get-metric-statistics \ --namespace AWS/ApplicationELB \ --metric-name RequestCount \ --dimensions Name = LoadBalancer,Value = app/my-alb/50dc6c495c0c9188 \ --start-time " $( date -u -d '7 days ago' +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ ) " \ --end-time " $( date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ ) " \ --period 86400 --statistics Sum \ --query 'Datapoints[].Sum' Near-zero request counts over a week is a strong idle signal. (For NLBs, use the AWS/NetworkELB namespace and ActiveFlowCount .) Step 2 - Check for empty or unhealthy target groups A load balancer with no healthy targets is doing nothing useful: for tg in $( aws elbv2 describe-target-groups \ --load-balancer-arn <lb-arn> \ --query 'TargetGroups[].TargetGroupArn' --output text ) ; do echo "== $tg ==" aws elbv2 describe-target-health --target-group-arn " $tg " \ --query 'TargetHealthDescriptions[].TargetHealth.State' --output text done Empty output (no targets) or all unhealthy alongside near-zero requests is a confident "delete me." Step 3 - Delete saf