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EKS control planes are $73/month per cluster. Stay on a Kubernetes version beyond its 14-month standard support and Extended Support bills $0.60/cluster-hour ($438/month per cluster), a 6× multiplier vs standard. EKS Auto Mode adds a ~12% markup over standard EC2 + EBS for managed compute simplicity. The compute side (Karpenter, Spot, Graviton) is where most of the bill lives.
Kevin W.EventBridge looks like a $1/million-events service. It is actually six different billing dimensions: custom events, Pipes at $0.40/M, API Destinations at $0.20/M, Schema Discovery at $0.10/M, Archive at $0.10/GB-month, and cross-region replication that doubles the publish line. Built-in AWS-service events are free; custom buses are where the bill lives.
Kevin W.GuardDuty bills across nine separate data sources: CloudTrail management events at a flat $4/M, VPC Flow Logs at $1/GB tiered, EKS Runtime Monitoring per vCPU-month, plus S3, DNS, Lambda, RDS, and Malware Protection. The 30-day free trial regularly hides the true production bill, and organization-wide auto-enable turns every new account into a billing line.
Kevin W.Lightsail bundles compute, storage, and bandwidth into flat monthly prices starting at $3.50/month (IPv6-only; $5 with a public IPv4 address), dramatically cheaper than the equivalent EC2 + EBS + Data Transfer math for predictable small workloads. The trap: data transfer overages bill at $0.09/GB, scaling locks you into bundle tiers, and migration to EC2 is more disruptive than starting on EC2 from day one.
Kevin W.Macie bills two ways: bucket-level evaluation at $0.10 per bucket per month, and sensitive-data discovery at $1.00 per GB inspected. A 500 GB bucket scanned for PII costs $500 just for the discovery; multi-bucket organizations easily hit $10K+ per month. Automated discovery is cheaper than full jobs but compounds across the bucket footprint.
Kevin W.Amazon MQ bills per broker instance hour: an mq.m5.large ActiveMQ active/standby pair is ~$420/month before storage. Add EFS storage, data transfer, and monitoring and a production HA deployment lands at $510 to $560/month, or $720 to $770 for a three-node RabbitMQ cluster, with zero messages flowing. Use MQ only when AMQP, JMS, STOMP, MQTT, or OpenWire protocol compatibility is non-negotiable.
Kevin W.SNS bills publish and delivery separately. Standard topic publish is $0.50/M, but HTTP delivery is $0.60/M on top, email is $2/100K, SMS varies by country, and mobile push is $0.50/M. A single publish to a topic fanned out to four protocols generates four billable lines, five if you count the cross-region data transfer.
Kevin W.SQS charges $0.40 per million standard requests and $0.50 per million FIFO requests, but a single 256 KB message counts as four requests under the 64 KB rule. Short polling on idle queues generates roughly 200 times the requests of long polling. Cross-region data transfer adds a line many teams never count.
Kevin W.The VPC itself, subnets, security groups, and route tables are free. The bill comes from what you attach: public IPv4 at $3.60/month per address (since Feb 2024), Interface VPC Endpoints at $0.01/hour per AZ, Transit Gateway at $0.05/hour per attachment, VPN at $0.05/hour, and inter-AZ data transfer at $0.01/GB each way. A modest production VPC easily lands at $500–$2,000/month.
Kevin W.AWS Backup bills at a service-specific rate: EFS warm at $0.05/GB-month, DynamoDB continuous backup at $0.20/GB-month, and cold storage at $0.01/GB-month with a 90-day minimum retention penalty. Cross-region copies double the storage line and add $0.02/GB transfer. Backup Audit Manager bills per control per resource, and the charges accumulate.
Kevin W.Most FinOps reviews happen weeks after infrastructure ships, when the bill arrives. CDK cost estimation flips that: synthesize the stack, walk the resource graph, query the AWS Pricing API per resource, and post a monthly-cost diff on every pull request. The cost feedback loop drops from weeks to minutes; the failure modes (request volume, token usage, data transfer) are documented up front.
Kevin W.Management events are free for the first trail. Data events bill $0.10 per 100K, and on a busy S3 bucket that lands at thousands per month. CloudTrail Lake is $0.75/GB ingested with one-year extendable retention ($0.023/GB-month after year one), or $2.50/GB with seven years of retention included. Insights events analyze every management event for anomalies at $0.35/100K. Wildcard data-event selectors are the usual source of the overspend.
Kevin W.
