Member-only story
The AWS Bill Shock I Didn’t Expect: How a Single ACM Setting Cost Me Money
Like many AWS users, I’ve always thought of AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) as one of those services you don’t need to worry about from a billing perspective.
Request a certificate.
Validate the domain.
Attach it to CloudFront, an Application Load Balancer, or an API Gateway.
Done.
For years, that assumption worked perfectly.
Then one day, while reviewing my AWS bill, I noticed a charge that didn’t look familiar.
It wasn’t EC2.
It wasn’t RDS.
It wasn’t data transfer.
It was ACM.
My first reaction was confusion.
“ACM is free… isn’t it?”
Well, yes and no.
The Small Checkbox That Changed Everything
I was working on a project that required access to the certificate. During the certificate request process, I enabled the option that allows the certificate to be exported.
At the time, it seemed harmless.
After all, having the ability to export a certificate provides flexibility. You can use it outside AWS, move it to another environment, or install it on third-party infrastructure.
