You can usually reduce AWS costs without touching reliability. Cloud bills rarely explode in one go. They creep: a test server nobody turned off, logs kept forever, a network setting that charges for every gigabyte.

For a small company it can become one of the biggest monthly bills, and a surprising share pays for nothing. This AWS cost optimisation checklist covers the recent pricing changes that caught many teams out, then the steps that save most for least effort.

Cost alerts and bill reviews are part of our cloud infrastructure service , but this checklist is work you can start yourself.

AWS pricing changes in 2024 and 2025 you may have missed

Every public IPv4 address now costs money

Since 1 February 2024 , AWS charges $0.005 per hour for every public IPv4 address , attached or idle: about $3.60 per address per month.

Small on its own, but load balancers, NAT gateways and servers can each hold several, and forgotten Elastic IPs add up.

What to do: list your public IPv4 addresses (the VPC…