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 \
