How we cut a client's cloud bill by 40% in six weeks
No migration, no rewrite — just disciplined measurement. The five changes that delivered the biggest savings on AWS.
Cloud bills creep up quietly. A few oversized instances here, an idle environment there, and suddenly you're paying for capacity nobody uses. We were asked to review a client's AWS spend — and brought it down 40% without a single migration.
The first rule of cost optimization: you can't cut what you can't see. We started by tagging every resource and pushing the Cost and Usage Report into a dashboard the whole team could read.
The five biggest wins
- Right-sizing: 30% of instances were running at under 10% CPU. Downsizing them was free money.
- Savings Plans: committing to a baseline of compute cut on-demand rates by ~25%.
- Killing idle environments: staging ran 24/7 for a team that worked 9-to-5. We scheduled it off at night.
- Storage tiering: moving cold data to cheaper tiers saved thousands a month.
- Egress audit: one misconfigured service was paying cross-region transfer fees needlessly.
None of this required heroics. Cost optimization is a discipline, not a project — the savings hold only if you keep the dashboard in front of the team. We handed over a monthly review ritual so the bill stays honest.