Pricing

Figures below are from the Amazon EC2 User Guide Application status checks page (retrieved 11 August 2026). Confirm in your account before budgeting.

What you pay

Application status checks bill on two components:

$0.01 per hour for each managed ENI, per Availability Zone.
Standard Amazon CloudWatch pricing for application status check metrics.

AWS creates one managed ENI per (source subnet × source security group) that has associated instances — not one ENI per instance.

Monthly ENI math

$0.01/hour × 24 × 30 = $7.20 per ENI per AZ in a 30-day month.

Fleet shape	Likely ENIs	ENI cost / 30 days
1 AZ, AWS-managed path, one source SG	1	$7.20
3 AZ Auto Scaling group, one source SG	3	$21.60
Many subnet/SG combinations	N	$7.20 × N
Local Zone targets	ENI in the parent Region	ENI hours plus Local Zone service-link data transfer

Compared with other health checks

Mechanism	Typical cost shape
EC2 application status checks	$7.20/month per managed ENI/AZ + CloudWatch
Application Load Balancer health checks	Included in ALB hours and LCU
Route 53 health checks (AWS endpoints)	$0.50 per check per month; first 50 AWS endpoints free

Route 53 is cheaper for a handful of public endpoints and more expensive as instance count grows. Application status checks stay cheap for large fleets if you keep source subnet/SG combinations small.

ALB health checks are not a substitute cost comparison if you do not already need a load balancer. Standing up an ALB only to get HTTP probes is usually more expensive than three ENIs.

What is not billed here

Auto Scaling fleet management has no extra fee.
You still pay for the EC2 instances, EBS, and data transfer you already run.
Local Zone health-check traffic uses the Local Zone service link and may incur additional data transfer.

Review quotas so target counts do not silently drop off monitoring.