DNS Cost Calculator

DNS is cheap until you have huge volume

Managed DNS is a rounding error for normal sites; it scales only with query millions and health checks. Longer TTLs cut billable lookups. Related: CDN cost calculator.

DNS pricing: pennies that matter at scale

Managed DNS bills per hosted zone (~$0.50/month) and per million queries (~$0.40). A small site's DNS costs less than a coffee yearly. The line items that change that: health checks ($0.50–$0.75 each monthly — a 20-endpoint failover setup is $150/year), geo-routing policies billed at a higher query rate, and DNSSEC signing on some providers. Query volume scales with TTL choices — a 60-second TTL on a busy record multiplies queries 5× versus five minutes. Free tiers at Cloudflare handle unlimited queries for most use cases, making paid DNS mostly a compliance or failover-features decision.

How this calculator works

The DNS Cost Calculator estimates your monthly managed DNS bill in the style of Route 53-type providers. It combines three inputs: the number of hosted zones you maintain, your queries per month (in millions), and the number of health checks you run. Each hosted zone carries a flat monthly fee, queries are billed per million (often on a tiered scale that gets cheaper at higher volume), and each health check adds a recurring charge. The tool multiplies each input by its rate and sums them so you can see the total before committing to a configuration.

The main lesson is that zone count and health checks are usually the quiet cost drivers, not raw query volume. A single low-traffic domain still owes its hosted-zone fee every month, so consolidating unused or duplicate zones often saves more than optimizing query counts. Watch health checks too, since they bill continuously per endpoint. Use the calculator to test how adding domains or monitoring endpoints changes your bill before you provision them.

Frequently asked questions

How is managed DNS priced?

A small monthly fee per hosted zone (about $0.50) plus a per-million-queries charge (about $0.40 for standard queries). Health checks and advanced routing policies (latency, geo, weighted) add extra. Alias records to AWS resources are often free to query.

Is DNS ever a real cost?

For most sites, no — it is cents. It only matters at very high query volume, with many zones, or heavy use of health checks and traffic policies. Caching via long TTLs also reduces billable queries.