AWS is brilliant. It’s also expensive if you don’t keep it on a leash.
Here’s how we slashed our bill by more than 50% with four simple steps.

 

Step 1: Find the cost hogs

First, we dug into the AWS bill. The culprits jumped out fast:

• OpenSearch - $60

• VPC - $50

• RDS - $50

• Load Balancing - $40

• EC2 - $35

• ECS - $25

Knowing what eats your budget is half the battle.

 

Step 2: Kill unused environments

The quickest win? Cleaning house.
Every idle environment had its own stack: VPCs, RDS, load balancers, EC2, S3, CloudFront, CloudWatch.

Deleting the unused ones - and downsizing shared DB instances - cut a big chunk of cost from storage, logging, and KMS.

 

Step 3: Schedule compute time

Not everything needs to run 24/7.
I set Elastic Beanstalk, RDS, and ECS to run Mon - Fri, 8 AM - 10 PM. Nights and weekends? Powered down.

Why pay for idle resources?

 

Step 4: Fix the public IP trap

In Feb 2024, AWS started charging for every public IPv4 address.
Most of ours were tied to Elastic Beanstalk’s defaults.

The plan: move to public-private environments. This not only saves on VPC costs but also tightens security.

 

The results

Between deleting unused stacks, adding schedules, and rethinking the network setup, we cut the AWS bill in half.

That’s hundreds - sometimes thousands - saved every month.

 

Our take

AWS costs spiral fast if no one’s watching. But with the right structure, you can shrink the bill without sacrificing performance.

Want us to take a look at your setup?
Come find us at Stand B1052.

Or book a free consultation during the show:
👉 https://tbs.th-ey.com/#booking