CloudBudgetMasterHow to Cut Your AWS Bill by 30%: A Practical FinOps Checklist
Cloud bills creep up quietly. A forgotten test instance here, an unattached volume there, and suddenly your AWS invoice is 30% higher than it needs to be. The good news: most of that waste is recoverable in an afternoon. Here is the checklist we run for every account.
1. Kill idle EC2 instances
Idle compute is the single biggest source of cloud waste. Look for instances with average CPU under 3% over the last two weeks.
- Stop or schedule dev and staging boxes outside work hours
- Rightsize anything consistently under 20% utilization
- Terminate instances no one can identify
2. Delete unattached EBS volumes and old snapshots
Storage you are not using still costs money every month.
- Remove EBS volumes in the
available(unattached) state - Prune snapshots older than your retention policy
3. Release unused Elastic IPs
An Elastic IP that is not attached to a running instance is billed hourly. Release the ones you do not need.
4. Right-size over-provisioned RDS
Databases are often sized for a launch-day spike that never came back. Check connection counts and CPU, then scale down.
5. Turn on cost anomaly alerts
The cheapest dollar to save is the one you never spend. Alerts catch a runaway spend the day it starts, not at month end.
The fastest path: CloudBudgetMaster scans your AWS, GCP, and Azure accounts read-only and flags every one of these automatically, with the exact monthly savings next to each item.