Why Your AWS Logging Bill Is Out of Control

Every few months, someone on your team opens the AWS bill, scrolls to CloudWatch, and says something unprintable. The number is always higher than last month. Nobody can explain why. This keeps happening because CloudWatch doesn't have a price. It has a pricing spreadsheet. Ingestion is one rate. Storage is another. Every query costs money. Every dashboard widget costs money. Alarms cost money. Cross-region anything costs money. And the numbers change depending on your region. Where the money actually goes Let's say you're running a typical setup. Five services, each producing about 4 GB of logs per day. That's 20 GB/day, or about 600 GB/month. Sounds manageable. Here's what CloudWatch charges you: Ingestion: $0.50/GB = $300/month Storage (after 5GB free): $0.03/GB/month, but data grows over time. With 30-day retention that's about $9/month. Not bad on its own. Queries via Logs Insights: $0.005 per GB scanned. Run 20 queries a day across 600 GB and you're at $60/month. Dashboards: $3/m