How Much Does It Actually Cost to Host a Web App on AWS?
AWS pricing pages are overwhelming. Here's a plain-English breakdown of real monthly costs for a startup web app — from MVP to early traction.
Most founders who ask this question get pointed to the AWS Pricing Calculator and immediately give up. The honest answer is: a basic production web app on AWS costs between $15 and $80 per month for early-stage startups. Let us break that down so you know what you are paying for.
The three core things a web app needs in production are compute (a server to run your code), storage (a database and file storage), and a CDN or load balancer to route traffic. Everything else is optional at the start.
For compute, the most common choice for a small app is an EC2 instance. A t4g.micro (1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, ARM-based) costs around $6 to $8 per month. A t4g.small doubles that to about $15. If your app has any real traffic or runs background jobs, plan for a t4g.medium at around $24 per month. These are on-demand prices. Reserved instances (one-year commitment) cut costs by 30 to 40 percent, which matters once you know your app is staying.
For your database, AWS RDS PostgreSQL on a db.t4g.micro costs around $13 to $16 per month for a 20 GB gp3 storage instance. That is enough for a startup with tens of thousands of rows. The database instance needs to be in a private subnet (not exposed to the internet), which also means you need a NAT gateway or VPC setup — that adds another $32 per month approximately if you need outbound internet from private resources. This is where AWS costs catch founders off guard. Alternatively, a managed Postgres service like Supabase or Neon starts free and scales gently, which can be cheaper for early apps.
For file storage, S3 is effectively free at small scale. Storing 10 GB of images or documents costs about $0.23 per month. You only start noticing S3 costs when you are transferring hundreds of gigabytes out of AWS per month (egress costs $0.09 per GB).
For traffic routing and HTTPS, an Application Load Balancer costs around $16 per month plus $0.008 per LCU hour. Many small apps skip the ALB at first and terminate HTTPS directly on the EC2 instance using Let's Encrypt via certbot, which is free. CloudFront (AWS's CDN) has a generous free tier of 1 TB per month of data transfer for the first 12 months.
Putting it together: a minimal but real production setup — one EC2 t4g.small, one RDS db.t4g.micro, S3, and Let's Encrypt for SSL — runs around $30 to $40 per month. Add an ALB and a NAT gateway and you are at $80 to $100. These numbers assume the AWS free tier has expired (12 months after account creation).
What founders often miss is the hidden cost of time. Setting up this infrastructure, securing it, configuring deployments, and keeping it maintained takes 20 to 40 hours of engineering work upfront, plus ongoing maintenance when AWS releases security patches, instance types are deprecated, or your app crashes at 2am. For many early founders, that time has a real cost.
If you want AWS-grade reliability without becoming a DevOps expert, working with a production engineering partner who sets it all up and keeps it running for a flat monthly fee is often cheaper than the engineering hours you would otherwise spend. That is exactly what Forge by DocxCloud is built for — production infrastructure handled, so you ship product.
The bottom line: budget $40 to $80 per month for a small production app on AWS, plus your own time or a setup fee to get there correctly. Do not let the pricing calculator scare you away from the right infrastructure.