A $40k bill for $9k of work
$40,100 to $11,913 a month
A Series A SaaS on ECS and RDS. NAT Gateway traffic, orphaned EBS volumes and a database sized during one bad week made up most of the bill.
Cut AWS costs line by line
Four anonymized bill teardowns, a 26-part pricing series and 91 free calculators for finding the lines that should not be on your AWS bill.
An AWS bill is a ledger of line items. The waste sits in a few of them: NAT traffic, idle disks and oversized databases.
Monthly AWS billSeries A SaaS, anonymized
| NAT Gateway (data transfer) | |
|---|---|
| RDS, db.r6g.4xlarge Multi-AZ | |
| EC2 / ECS compute | $5,800 |
| EBS volumes | |
| S3 | $1,800 |
| Data transfer out | $1,400 |
| CloudWatch | $600 |
| Other | $400 |
| Total | $40,100 |
From Bill Teardown 1, July 2026 refresh. Your bill will have its own lines.
Fix one real bill
Three changes took this bill from $40,100 to $11,913 a month without touching the application. Switch each one on.
Send S3 and DynamoDB traffic around the NAT Gateway
Free gateway endpoints. NAT drops from $14,200 to $800 a month. Price yours in the NAT Gateway Pricing Calculator
Size the database for the workload it has now
db.r6g.4xlarge to db.t4g.large plus a read replica: $11,000 to $213 a month. Price yours in the RDS Pricing Calculator
Delete the disks nothing is attached to
Unattached volumes removed, the rest moved to gp3: $4,900 to $900 a month. Price yours in the IOPS Cost Calculator
Four bill teardowns
NAT Gateways eating the budget
About $200k a year on NAT
A regional healthcare estate across three accounts, on a VPC designed in 2019. S3 and Secrets Manager calls went through NAT. The fix cut that spend by about 78%.
The November data transfer trap
$20,200 in August, $87,000 in November
A mid-size retailer at peak: CloudFront requests bypassing the cache, cross-AZ traffic between the load balancer and ECS, and Transfer Acceleration on the wrong bucket.
Savings Plans in the wrong account
$312k a year of leaked commitment
Compute Savings Plans covered only 61% of production while dev sandboxes used the rest. Group Sharing and restructured purchases took production coverage to 89%.
Client names and identifying details are removed or composited.
Start with the framework
- FinOps on AWS: Complete Guide to Cloud Cost Governance
The Inform, Optimize and Operate framework, the AWS-native tools, and who owns which part of the bill.
- Cost Control Is Architecture, Not Discounts
Savings Plans lower the rate. Architecture sets the volume you pay that rate on.
- Cloud Cost Optimization in 2026: 8 Modern Strategies
Eight strategies, from unit economics to automated Savings Plans and cost observability.
- Reserved Instances vs Savings Plans (2026)
The decision tree for term, payment option and instance-family flexibility.
The AWS pricing series
26 services, one guide each: what you are billed for, where the traps are, and the calculator to check your own numbers.
Every cost calculator
Prices from the AWS price list, checked Sep 2026 or later. No sign-up.
Plan the spend
- AWS Cost Savings CalculatorEstimated annual savings range
- Savings Plans ROI CalculatorSavings Plan ROI comparison
- Reserved Instance Break-EvenRI break-even month + savings
- AWS Cost Waste QuizPersonalized waste risk score
- Scaling Cost Explosion SimulatorBill projection at multiple scale points
- Commitment Level OptimizerRecommended commitment percentage + monthly savings
- Well-Architected AssessmentArchitecture health score across 6 pillars
- Spot Eligibility CheckerSpot readiness tier + next step
Price one service
- ACM Export
- Amazon Inspector
- Amazon MQ
- Amazon Q
- API Gateway
- Athena
- Aurora
- AWS Backup
- AWS Config
- AWS MGN
- Bedrock
- Bedrock AgentCore
- Braket
- Budgets
- Cloud Map
- CloudFormation
- CloudFront
- CloudHSM
- CloudTrail
- CloudWatch
- CodeArtifact
- CodeBuild
- CodePipeline
- Cognito
- Comprehend
- Cost Explorer
- Data Firehose
- Direct Connect
- Directory Service
- DMS
- DocumentDB
- DynamoDB
- EBS
- EC2
- ECS
- EFS
- EKS
- ElastiCache
- ELB
- EMR
- EventBridge
- Fargate
- Fargate vs EC2
- FSx
- Glue
- GuardDuty
- IAM Access Analyzer
- IoT Core
- Kendra
- KMS
- Lake Formation
- Lambda
- Lightsail
- Macie
- MSK
- NAT Gateway
- Neptune
- Network Firewall
- OpenSearch
- Polly
- Private CA
- RDS
- Redshift
- Route 53
- S3
- SageMaker AI
- SageMaker Notebook
- Secrets Manager
- Security Hub
- Security Lake
- Service Catalog
- Shield
- SNS
- SQS
- Step Functions
- Storage Gateway
- Systems Manager
- Textract
- Timestream
- Transcribe
- Transit Gateway
- VPC
- WAF
Send us the bill. We find the lines.
A free 30-minute call. We go through Cost Explorer with you and name the fixes, or tell you why there are none.
Book a free cost auditCost optimization servicesFinOps consulting
Pictures:Miss Cowell with Hollerith Machine, 1964 (no known copyright restrictions); A woman with a Hollerith pantograph punch , the keyboard is for the 1940 US census population card(Truesdell p.144). Compare with File:Census pantograph and 1930s keypunches.jpg , which includes the same woman., Unknown author Unknown author or not provided (public domain); Burroughs Adding and Listing machine 1912 at CHM, Tomwsulcer (CC0); Pittsboro Merchant Business Ledger (public domain).Via Wikimedia Commons.
.jpg){kind=link}