Monthly cost by gateway
Ranked cheapest first for your volume. Request charges only — data transfer, caching and WAF are billed separately.
| Gateway | $/1M requests | Monthly total | Notes |
|---|
The gateway can cost more than the code behind it
Teams obsess over compute and forget the toll booth in front of it. An API gateway charges a small fee for every request that passes through — and at scale those small fees add up to a line item that occasionally exceeds the backend it protects. A million requests through AWS's full REST API costs about $3.50 in gateway fees before a single line of your function runs; if that function is a fast, thin handler, the gateway is the expensive part. The single biggest lever most teams miss is that AWS sells two gateways: the feature-rich REST API and the lean HTTP API at roughly a third of the price. If you're not using request transformation, usage plans or the other REST-only features, moving to the HTTP API can cut your gateway bill by around 70% with no change to your backend.
The honest way to reason about per-request economics is to add the gateway and the compute together. Price the gateway here, price what runs behind it on the serverless function cost calculator or your container platform, and read the combined cost per thousand requests. That total — not either half alone — is what each API call actually costs you, and it's the number to base pricing, rate limits and free-tier decisions on. For very high volume, simple routing, a Cloudflare Workers gateway often undercuts the managed gateways enough to change the architecture decision entirely.
How to use it
1. Enter your monthly request volume — total calls hitting the gateway.
2. Choose whether to apply each provider's free tier.
3. Read the ranked table. Note the gap between AWS REST and HTTP API — for many services that switch is the easiest saving available.
Common mistakes
Using REST API when HTTP API would do. The advanced features cost roughly 3× per request — only pay for them if you use them. Forgetting data transfer. Egress is billed on top of request fees and can dominate for large responses. Ignoring caching. Gateway caching cuts backend load but is itself billed per GB-hour — worth it only for genuinely repeated requests. Pricing the gateway in isolation. Always add the compute behind it for the real per-call cost.
FAQ
Is a gateway even necessary?
Not always. For a single service you can expose a function URL or load balancer directly and skip the gateway fee. Gateways earn their cost when you need auth, rate limiting, routing across many services, request validation or a stable public contract.
Why is Cloudflare so much cheaper?
A Workers gateway runs your routing logic at the edge and bills CPU time plus a low per-request rate, rather than a managed-gateway premium. It's cheaper but you assemble more of the features yourself.
Does this include Azure's fixed tiers?
It models Azure API Management's consumption (per-call) pricing. The Developer, Basic, Standard and Premium tiers add a fixed monthly instance fee for higher throughput and features — factor those in separately if you need them.
What about data transfer costs?
Egress is separate and can exceed request fees for response-heavy APIs. Estimate it on the cloud egress cost calculator and add it to the gateway figure here.
Estimate only. Request-based rates; add data transfer and fixed tier fees for a full budget.