How can I reduce my AWS bill?
How to reduce your AWS bill: find waste with Cost Explorer, rightsize, use Savings Plans and Spot, fix storage and data transfer costs, and build a FinOps habit.
Short answer
To reduce your AWS bill, first find where money goes with Cost Explorer and tags, then delete idle resources, rightsize oversized instances and databases, move steady workloads to Savings Plans or Reserved Instances, use Spot for interruptible work, add S3 lifecycle policies, and cut data transfer and NAT gateway charges. Review spend monthly so savings stick.
By the Celestibia Solutions engineering team · Published
Step-by-step: reducing AWS cost
1. Make cost visible
Enable Cost Explorer and the Cost and Usage Report, activate cost allocation tags, and break spend down by account, service and team. You cannot cut what you cannot attribute.
2. Remove waste
Stop or delete unused EC2 instances, unattached EBS volumes, old snapshots, idle load balancers, unused Elastic IPs and forgotten test environments.
3. Rightsize
Use CloudWatch metrics and AWS Compute Optimizer to match instance and database sizes to real utilization. Consider Graviton instances where your software supports ARM.
4. Commit to steady usage
Cover predictable baseline usage with Compute Savings Plans or Reserved Instances. Start conservatively and add commitments as usage stabilizes.
5. Use Spot where interruption is acceptable
Batch jobs, CI runners and stateless Kubernetes workloads can often run on Spot capacity at a large discount.
6. Fix storage
Apply S3 lifecycle rules and Intelligent-Tiering, move gp2 volumes to gp3, and set retention on logs and backups.
7. Reduce data transfer
Use VPC endpoints instead of NAT gateways for AWS service traffic, keep chatty services in the same Availability Zone where safe, and serve content through CloudFront.
8. Govern
Set AWS Budgets and Cost Anomaly Detection alerts and hold a monthly cost review with engineering and finance.
Why AWS bills keep increasing
- Resources from finished projects left running.
- Instances sized for peak load running at low utilization all day.
- On-demand pricing for workloads that have been steady for months.
- Growing NAT gateway and inter-AZ data transfer charges.
- Unbounded log, snapshot and S3 storage growth.
How much can you save?
Savings depend on how the environment was built. In Celestibia’s published engagements, a SaaS platform on Amazon EKS reduced cloud cost by 38% using Savings Plans, rightsizing and autoscaling; a banking migration delivered 25% savings; and a retail migration delivered 18%.
Key takeaways
- Visibility and tagging come before any optimization.
- Waste removal and rightsizing are the fastest wins; commitments are the largest durable ones.
- A monthly review keeps savings from eroding.
Related questions
Are Savings Plans better than Reserved Instances?
Compute Savings Plans are more flexible: they apply across instance families, regions, Fargate and Lambda. Reserved Instances can still make sense for databases such as RDS and for specific capacity needs. Most companies use a mix.
What is AWS rightsizing?
Rightsizing is matching instance types and sizes to the CPU, memory and I/O a workload actually uses, based on monitoring data, so you stop paying for idle capacity.
How Celestibia helps
Further reading
Want this applied to your environment?
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What happens next
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- You get tailored recommendations and the AWS programs you are likely to qualify for.
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