The Situation
A Fintech startup reached out to us. Their AWS bill was $12,000/month and growing.
They were profitable, but burning $144k a year on infrastructure felt wrong for their size. They wanted a 20% reduction. We gave them 40%.
Step 1: The "Zombie" Resources ($2,000/mo saved)
We ran a simple audit and found:
- Unattached EBS Volumes: Hard drives from terminated instances still sitting there.
- Old Snapshots: Daily backups from 2 years ago that no one needed.
- Idle Load Balancers: Pointing to dev environments that didn't exist anymore.
Action: Delete. Delete. Delete.
2. The NAT Gateway Trap ($1,500/mo saved)
They had 3 environments (Dev, Staging, Prod). Each had highly available NAT Gateways across 3 availability zones.
3 Envs * 3 AZs = 9 NAT Gateways.
Price per hour + Data processing fees = $$$$
Action:
1. Removed NAT Gateways in Dev/Staging (used public subnets with strict security groups instead).
2. Reduced Prod to 1 AZ NAT Gateway until traffic scaled.
3. Right-Sizing Compute ($1,200/mo saved)
Their developers loved m5.2xlarge instances. "It's faster," they said.
CloudWatch metrics showed average CPU utilization was 4%.
Action: Downgraded to t3.medium and m5.large. No performance impact observed.
The Result
Old Bill
$12,000 / mo
New Bill
$7,200 / mo
That is $57,600 saved per year. That's almost half a junior engineer's salary.
Think you're overpaying?
Most startups are overpaying by 30% or more. Let us find your wasted spend.
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Contact Devopsby.me today.