Amazon Fargate & ECS Task Pricing: vCPU-Seconds, Ephemeral Storage, and Fargate vs EC2 Launch Type (2026)
Quick summary: Fargate bills per vCPU-second and GB-second — not per task hour. A 0.25 vCPU / 0.5 GB task running 24/7 costs ~$9/mo in us-east-1; a 4 vCPU / 16 GB task costs ~$145/mo. ECS on EC2 adds cluster overhead but wins at sustained utilization above ~55%.
Key Takeaways
- A 0
- 25 vCPU / 0
- 5 GB task running 24/7 costs ~$9/mo in us-east-1; a 4 vCPU / 16 GB task costs ~$145/mo
- ECS on EC2 adds cluster overhead but wins at sustained utilization above ~55%
- astro'; As of June 2026, Fargate prices Linux x86 at $0
Table of Contents
As of June 2026, Fargate prices Linux x86 at $0.04048/vCPU-hour and $0.004445/GB-hour in us-east-1; Graviton (arm64) runs ~20% lower. ECS itself has no per-task control-plane fee on EC2 launch type — you pay EC2 (or Fargate) plus optional Service Connect, CloudWatch, and data transfer.
Quantified pattern
A B2B API platform (~$22k/mo containers, 40 Fargate services) averaged 38% CPU utilization on rightsized tasks. Moving steady-state services to ECS on EC2 with Spot capacity providers cut container compute $6,800/mo (~31%) with two weeks of platform engineering. Bursty webhook workers stayed on Fargate.
Fargate vs ECS on EC2
| Factor | Fargate | ECS on EC2 |
|---|---|---|
| Ops burden | Lowest | AMI, patching, scaling |
| Billing unit | vCPU + GB seconds | EC2 instance hours |
| Best fit | Spiky / small teams | Sustained utilization |
| Spot | Fargate Spot (interruptions) | EC2 Spot via capacity providers |
Model all three paths: Fargate calculator, ECS on EC2 calculator, Fargate vs EC2 calculator.
If you only do one thing this week
Pull ECS CPUUtilization and MemoryUtilization for your top five services by cost. Any service under 30% average CPU and memory for 14 days is a Fargate rightsizing candidate — drop one vCPU or 1 GB and re-measure before changing launch type.
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