12 proven ways to reduce your AWS bill
Practical AWS cost optimisation: rightsizing, Savings Plans, Graviton, Spot, storage tiers, data transfer and FinOps habits that keep bills down.
Practical AWS cost optimisation: rightsizing, Savings Plans, Graviton, Spot, storage tiers, data transfer and FinOps habits that keep bills down.
Compute
- Rightsize EC2 and RDS using Compute Optimizer recommendations
- Buy Compute Savings Plans for steady baseline usage
- Move suitable workloads to Graviton (ARM) instances
- Use Spot for batch, CI and stateless workloads
- Schedule non-production environments to stop out of hours
- Consider Lambda or Fargate for spiky workloads
Storage
- Apply S3 lifecycle rules and Intelligent-Tiering
- Delete unattached EBS volumes and old snapshots
- Switch gp2 volumes to gp3 (cheaper, faster baseline)
Networking and data transfer
NAT Gateway processing and cross-AZ traffic are common surprises. Use VPC endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB, keep chatty services in the same AZ where resilience allows, and serve static content through CloudFront.
FinOps habits
- Tag every resource by environment, team and product
- Set AWS Budgets and Cost Anomaly Detection alerts
- Review Cost Explorer monthly with engineering
- Manage infrastructure in Terraform so waste can’t creep back
Common mistakes to avoid
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Frequently asked questions
How much can I save on AWS?
Many accounts save 20–50% through rightsizing, commitments and removing waste.
Savings Plans or Reserved Instances?
Compute Savings Plans are more flexible and suit most teams; RIs still make sense for some RDS and ElastiCache usage.
Is Graviton compatible with my app?
Most modern Linux workloads — PHP, Node, Python, Java, containers — run on Graviton with little or no change.