If your AWS (Amazon's cloud platform) bill goes up every month and nobody can quite explain it, you are not doing anything wrong. It is what almost every growing company runs into. The good news: most of the extra spend is waste, and waste can be cleaned up without touching how your product works. Start with a free review and one specific saving you can act on.
Most bills leak in the same few places.
Here is how it almost always happens. You ship a feature, sign a few more customers, and someone spins up something new to test an idea. Each change is small and sensible on its own. But nothing ever gets cleaned up, so the bill creeps up roughly 10 to 20 percent every quarter. Add that up and you are paying a lot more this year than last, for reasons no single person can fully explain.
When we review a bill, the overspend almost always traces back to the same handful of things. None of them mean anyone did a bad job. They are just what happens when a company grows faster than it tidies up.
Your app runs on rented computers from Amazon called EC2 (the rented servers your app runs on). Early on, someone picks a size, usually a big safe one so nothing falls over. Months later that server is doing a fraction of what it could handle — but you are still paying for the whole thing. It is like renting a 50-seat bus every day to carry a single backpack. Right-sizing means matching the rental to the actual load, and it is one of the fastest wins there is.
Someone spins up a server, a spare copy of the database, or a storage bucket for a one-off task — and then moves on. The task is done, but the meter keeps running. Multiply that by a few years of a busy team and you have a stack of things nobody uses, still billing you every hour of every day. This includes idle databases on RDS (Amazon's managed database service) and old backups no one will ever restore. The fix is finding them and switching them off.
Amazon gives you a real discount — often a big one — if you commit to using a certain amount over a year or more. It is the difference between an annual gym membership and paying full price every single visit. Plenty of companies run steady, predictable workloads at the full walk-in rate simply because nobody set the discounts up. For the parts of your setup that are always on, this is money left on the table for no reason.
Amazon charges you a small fee whenever data leaves its network — think of it as a toll road where you pay every time you drive out. On its own each toll is tiny, but a busy app crosses that line millions of times a day. Serving lots of images, video, or downloads is a common culprit, and it is exactly where a content-delivery network like CloudFront (Amazon's content-delivery network), set up correctly, can cut the tolls dramatically. Most teams never notice this line item until someone adds it up.
Your team needs copies of the app to build and test on — staging, development, demo environments. The catch: these usually run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, even though your team only touches them during working hours. That is like heating and lighting the whole office all night and all weekend when nobody is in. Switching them off automatically outside work hours can quietly cut a big slice of the bill, with zero impact on anyone.
Notice that not one of these is someone messing up. They are the natural side effects of a team moving fast and building. That is why cost work is safe: we are not undoing your engineers' decisions, we are cleaning up the drift those decisions left behind. A fresh pair of eyes, whose only job is the bill, finds in a few days what a busy team never has time to look for.
You will see big percentages thrown around online. Here is where our headline number really comes from, and what a more typical result looks like — both with the real company behind them, not a made-up average.
This is the kind of outcome we aim for. A UK health-tech company was carrying a lot of the drift described above. We reviewed it, right-sized what was oversized, cleaned up what was idle, and set up the discounts they were missing. The result: a 38 percent cut — about $18,000 a month, or roughly $214,000 over a year — delivered in about 90 days, with no disruption to their product.
The bigger “up to 60 percent” number is real, but it came from a specific job: moving nine applications off Heroku (another hosting platform) and rebuilding them properly on AWS. When a company is paying a premium for convenience, the savings from moving can be dramatic. That is the top of the range — not what every account will see, but proof of what is possible when the setup is wrong for the workload.
“Jobin and the HAZERCLOUD team quickly reviewed our issue with CloudFront usage and implemented a solution that allows us to lower our costs significantly. He further assisted in the configuration to help us tune the solution for optimal results.”
You should never spend more finding savings than the savings are worth. So the pricing is built around that idea: a clear fixed fee to see the full picture, and implementation that lines up with the money we actually save you.
If you have an engineer or a CTO who wants the deeper, technical version — the tools, the methodology, and the architecture behind these savings — send them to our AWS Cost Optimization page. Same work, written for people who live in the AWS console.
Book a short, free review of your AWS bill. You do not need to prepare anything technical — bring the bill and your questions. You walk away with at least one concrete way to spend less, that you can act on whether or not you ever work with us. No pressure, no jargon, no obligation.
Straight answers, in plain English. Don't see your question? Book the free review and ask it directly.
Book the free review →Bring your AWS bill and your questions. We will point at where the money is leaking and give you at least one concrete saving you can act on — no jargon, no commitment, and no need to prepare anything technical. It is the easiest first step there is.
★AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner · ISO 27001:2022 · 38% Cut, $214k/Year Saved For UK HealthTech
