We Were Paying $14,000/Month on AWS. I Got It Down to $3,800. Here's How.

Our AWS bill went from $2,000/month to $14,000/month over 18 months. Nobody noticed until finance flagged it. Most of the increase was waste. Here's every optimization I made, in order of impact. 1. Kill Zombie Resources ($4,200/month saved) Unused resources that nobody remembered creating: # Find unattached EBS volumes (you're paying for these) aws ec2 describe-volumes --filters "Name=status,Values=available" \ --query 'Volumes[*].{ID:VolumeId,Size:Size,Created:CreateTime}' \ --output table # Find unused Elastic IPs ($3.65/month each — adds up) aws ec2 describe-addresses --query 'Addresses[?AssociationId==null]' # Find old snapshots (often forgotten) aws ec2 describe-snapshots --owner self \ --query 'Snapshots[?StartTime<`2025-01-01`].{ID:SnapshotId,Size:VolumeSize}' # Find idle load balancers (no healthy targets) aws elbv2 describe-target-health --target-group-arn <arn> \ --query 'TargetHealthDescriptions[?TargetHealth.State!=`healthy`]' What I found: 23 unattached EBS volumes (lefto