A growing SaaS client came to us with an AWS bill that had doubled in a year while traffic grew by a third. The product was fine. The infrastructure around it had simply never been reviewed.
Start with the bill, not the architecture
- Turn on Cost Explorer and tag every resource by environment and team
- Sort spend by service and look at the top five lines first
- Anything without an owner is a candidate for removal
The usual suspects
- Idle staging and QA environments running 24/7. Schedule them to stop outside working hours.
- Oversized instances. Most were running under 15% CPU. One size down saved thousands a month.
- Old EBS snapshots and unattached volumes left over from past deployments.
- NAT gateway data charges from services talking to S3 over the public route. A VPC endpoint fixed it.
Commit only after you right-size
Savings Plans and Reserved Instances are powerful, but buy them after cleanup, not before. Otherwise you lock in the waste.
Cheapest server is the one you switched off.
The result
Within six weeks the monthly bill dropped by 38%, with no change to the application and no downtime. If your cloud costs are climbing faster than your users, talk to us.
Written by Stream Quanta Tech team
Published 6 Oct 2026
