Latest / The Cloud Business Podcast with Fexingo: AWS, Azure, GCP, and Enterprise Infrastructure / How Cloud Bills Now Charge for DNS Query Volumes
Transcript
- Lucas: So I was looking at a recent cloud bill for a large e-commerce client, and buried in the line items was something I hadn't seen before: a charge for DNS queries. Not for hosted zones, not for traffic routing, but for every single lookup their applications make. Luna: You mean like, they're charging per DNS query now? I thought that was always included. Lucas: It used to be, for the most part. But over the past couple of years, the major providers — AWS with Route 53, Azure with Azure DNS, Google Cloud with Cloud DNS — have been slowly shifting from bundling DNS into the base service to metering every lookup. And the bills are starting to show it. Luna: So what changed? Did they just flip a switch one day? Lucas: Not exactly. AWS introduced a per-query pricing tier for Route 53 back in 2023, but the default was still unlimited queries for a flat fee. Then earlier this year, they rolled out a new pricing model that charges per million queries for customers above a certain threshold. Azure and Google Cloud have similar structures now, and they're all nudging customers toward metered plans. Luna: And that e-commerce client — how much did their DNS bill jump? Lucas: About forty thousand dollars a month. They had a highly distributed architecture with lots of microservices, each making tens of thousands of DNS lookups per second. Under the old flat fee, it was negligible. Now it's a line item that catches your attention. Luna: Forty grand a month just for DNS? That's wild. So what's driving all those queries? Lucas: A lot of it is the way modern apps are built. Every microservice call, every load balancer target, every service discovery request — they all start with a DNS lookup. And if you're not caching aggressively, you're paying for every single one. I've seen clients with default TTLs that are way too short, so they're re-resolving constantly. Luna: So the fix is just to cache more? Lucas: That's the first lever. But there's also a pricing tier issue. Route 53 now has a cheaper tier for 'infrequent' queries and a premium tier for high performance. If you're on the premium tier but most of your lookups don't need the extra speed, you're overpaying. Same with Azure DNS — they have a basic and a standard tier, and the standard tier costs more per query. Luna: So you could save money just by right-sizing your DNS plan? Lucas: Exactly. And the providers are counting on most customers not noticing. They bury these charges in the monthly bill, and they don't make it obvious that you could switch to a cheaper plan. It's like the data egress fees we talked about back in episode 146 — it's a revenue stream that's easy to overlook. Luna: It feels like the cloud providers are getting creative with their billing. What's next, charging for every ICMP ping? Lucas: Don't give them ideas. But the trend is real: they're unbundling everything that was once 'free' to drive incremental revenue. And DNS is a perfect candidate because it's so fundamental and so rarely optimized. Luna: So what's the practical advice for a company that's seeing this on their bill? Besides caching more. Lucas: First, audit your DNS architecture. Look at your query volume, your TTL settings, and which tier you're on. Then, negotiate. If you're a big customer, you can often get volume discounts or custom pricing. The providers are flexible if you ask. Luna: And for smaller teams? Lucas: Third-party resolvers can help. Services like Cloudflare or Google's public DNS can offload a lot of your query volume for free or at a flat rate. But you have to be careful about latency and compliance — some industries require you to use your provider's DNS for regulatory reasons. Luna: So it's not always a simple switch. Lucas: Right. And that's the thing — cloud pricing is getting more granular, and the winners are the ones who understand the metering. FinOps teams are going to be busy for a while. Luna: Definitely. And speaking of what we do here — we keep this show ad-free, and that's a choice we make because we think it's the right way to deliver value. If you find these conversations useful for what you're building or running, and you want to support that, you can buy me a coffee at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just if it's worth something to you. Lucas: Yeah, that's a good point. We don't run ads, and that's a deliberate decision. It keeps the focus on the substance, not the sponsors. So if that's valuable to you, the link is there. Luna: And we're back to DNS — because there's one more angle I want to hit. It's not just about the bill today. It's about what this trend means for the future of cloud pricing. Lucas: Right. And I think the DNS charge is a leading indicator. If providers can meter DNS, they can meter anything. We're seeing the same pattern with other foundational services — like IAM, logging, even security scanning. Luna: So the next few years are going to be about figuring out which bills are worth paying and which are just nickel and diming. Lucas: Exactly. And the companies that stay ahead will be the ones that treat cloud costs like a strategic issue, not just a monthly annoyance. They'll build cost-awareness into their engineering culture. Luna: That's a good note to end on. For now, keep an eye on your DNS line item — it might surprise you. Lucas: And if you've seen your own DNS charges spike, we'd love to hear about it. You can reach us through the show notes. Until next time.