AWS Cost Optimization for Startups: Save 40% on Your Bill

Quick Wins (Do These Today)

Most AWS accounts have hundreds of dollars in obvious waste. Here's where to look:

Unattached EBS volumes

Go to EC2 → Volumes → filter by "available." These are disks attached to nothing, charging you money for storing air. Delete them.

Typical savings: €50-200/month

Old snapshots

EC2 → Snapshots → sort by date. Anything older than 90 days that isn't part of a backup strategy can probably go.

Typical savings: €20-100/month

Unused Elastic IPs

You pay for unattached elastic IPs. If you're not using it, release it.

Savings: €3.60/month each (adds up fast)

Stopped instances still costing money

A stopped instance doesn't charge for compute, but its EBS storage still costs money. If you're not using it, terminate it.

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Right-Sizing Your Infrastructure

This is where real money lives.

Check CloudWatch metrics for your EC2 instances. If average CPU utilization is under 20% over two weeks, you're probably overprovisioned.

Multiply by the number of instances. A 50-server fleet that's 2x overprovisioned is throwing away thousands monthly.

Same applies to RDS. Database instances are often oversized "just in case." Check CloudWatch—if your database isn't breaking a sweat, it's too big.

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Reserved vs On-Demand

If you've been running the same instances for 3+ months and plan to continue, you're wasting money on on-demand pricing.

Start conservative. Reserve your most stable workloads for 1 year. Don't lock into 3-year commitments until you're confident your architecture is stable.

Savings Plans are more flexible than Reserved Instances—they apply across instance families. Good if your exact instance types might change.

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Database Costs

RDS is often 40-50% of the AWS bill. Here's how to cut it:

Aurora Serverless v2 scales automatically. Great for variable traffic—you're not paying for peak capacity during quiet hours.

Read replicas for read-heavy workloads. One large instance handling reads and writes costs more than a medium primary with a medium replica.

Single-AZ for dev/staging. Multi-AZ doubles your cost. Only use it for production.

Consider managed alternatives. Sometimes RDS is overkill. PlanetScale, Supabase, or even managed MongoDB can be cheaper for specific use cases.

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Ongoing Habits

Cost optimization isn't a one-time project. Build these habits:

Monthly bill review

15 minutes, first week of each month. Look at Cost Explorer, identify anything unexpected, dig into spikes.

Budget alerts

Set alerts at 50%, 80%, and 100% of expected spending. AWS Budgets makes this easy.

Tagging everything

Tags let you see which project or team is spending what. Without tags, cost allocation is guesswork.

Rightsizing reports

AWS Cost Explorer has built-in rightsizing recommendations. Check them quarterly.

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What we typically find

When we audit a startup's AWS account, we usually find 25-40% savings available. Common culprits:

If your AWS bill feels too high, it probably is. Happy to take a look.