Cloud Cost CheckupUpdated October 4, 2026

AWS cost guides

How to find common AWS waste yourself, with exact console paths, read-only CLI commands, and savings arithmetic from AWS's own us-east-1 list prices. Each guide links to the AWS pages its numbers come from.

Why is my AWS bill so high?
Finding the service and usage type behind a surprise bill in Cost Explorer, and the usual causes.
gp2 to gp3: how much it saves, and how to switch
20% less per GB, converted in place. Why very large volumes save less, and how to set IOPS and throughput.
Why your NAT Gateway bill is so high, and how to cut it
$0.045 an hour plus $0.045 per GB, even for S3 traffic. Free gateway endpoints, and how to see where the traffic goes.
The AWS public IPv4 charge: finding idle Elastic IPs
$3.65 a month per address since February 2024. Finding idle Elastic IPs and every other public address.
Unattached EBS volumes and old snapshots
Detached disks, stopped instances and snapshot chains, and why deleting a snapshot can save less than you expect.
Idle, oversized and older EC2 instances
Reading 14 days of CPU data, what one size down saves, and m4, c4 and t2 against newer and Graviton families.
Stopped EC2 instances and RDS databases: what still bills
Volumes, Elastic IPs, database storage and backups keep billing, and RDS restarts a stopped database after 7 days.
How to reduce Amazon RDS costs
Idle and oversized databases, Multi-AZ on dev, why gp3 costs the same as gp2 on RDS, and reservations or Savings Plans.
RDS Extended Support: are you paying it, and what will it cost?
$0.100 per vCPU-hour, then $0.200 in year 3, for PostgreSQL 11 to 13 and MySQL 5.7 and 8.0. The calendar, a worked example and how to upgrade.
Idle load balancers: what an unused ALB or NLB costs
$0.0225 an hour plus capacity units, with or without targets. Finding the ones with nothing behind them.
CloudWatch Logs cost: ingestion, storage and retention
$0.50 per GB in, $0.03 per GB-month kept, and log groups that never expire. How to set retention.
S3 storage costs: storage classes, lifecycle rules and hidden charges
$0.023 per GB-month in Standard. Transition costs, incomplete multipart uploads, old versions and the Intelligent-Tiering monitoring fee.
Savings Plans vs Reserved Instances: choosing and sizing a commitment
Discounts, terms and flexibility compared, how to read Cost Explorer's recommendation, and what over-committing costs.

Rather not check by hand? The free checkup looks for all of these and a few more, including S3 buckets without lifecycle rules, Lambda functions on x86 and Savings Plan recommendations. A read-only script collects the data, and the analysis runs in your browser.

Run a free checkup See a sample report