How do I reduce my AWS bill?

Short description

You can use a variety of tools and approaches to analyze and optimize the costs of your AWS resources. You can choose the cost optimization techniques that are appropriate for your business and workload.

Resolution

Analyze your costs

• Use Cost Explorer to view, analyze, and forecast your spending and usage free of charge. Cost Explorer provides historical data, current month cost data, and forecasts for the next three months.
• Create an AWS Cost and Usage Report to get detailed data about your AWS bill in one of your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. For information on how to use this report, see How do I use the AWS Cost and Usage Report?
• Use AWS Budgets to plan your service usage, costs, and instance reservations. With AWS Budgets, you can set custom budgets that proactively alert you when your costs exceed your budgeted amount. For more information, see How can I use AWS Budgets to track my spending and usage?

Optimize your costs

Note: These tools can help you manage your AWS usage and costs, but they cannot automatically pause or stop AWS services.

• AWS Trusted Advisor can help you identify resources that you aren't using to their full capacity. Then, you can decide to delete these underutilized resources to optimize your costs. To receive email notifications of Trusted Advisor checks, see How do I set up email notifications for AWS Trusted Advisor in my account? For information on how to delete your underutilized resources, see How do I terminate active resources that I no longer need on my AWS account?
• If you have predictable workloads on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Fargate, or AWS Lambda and are paying the default On-Demand pricing, then you can save money by choosing an appropriate Savings Plan. For more information, see How do I save money on my AWS usage using a Savings Plan?
• Use the AWS Instance Scheduler to reduce the costs of EC2 and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances used in non-production environments. For more information, see How do I use Instance Scheduler with CloudFormation to schedule EC2 instances?
• If you're using the S3 Standard storage class and have infrequently accessed objects, then enable S3 Intelligent-Tiering for automatic cost optimization. You can choose S3 Intelligent-Tiering when you upload your objects to Amazon S3. Then, add the appropriate Lifecycle configuration to move your objects to S3 Intelligent-Tiering.
• Use Amazon EC2 Spot Instances for your stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications, such as containerized workloads, to reduce your operating costs. For more information, see Spot Instances.
• When EC2 instances are terminated, the attached Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes aren't automatically deleted. Find the unattached EBS volumes that you no longer need. Then, you can delete them after optionally creating an EBS snapshot. For more information, see Why am I being charged for Amazon EBS when all my instances are stopped?
  Important: The data in the EBS volume is lost on deletion, and the volume can't be attached to any instance.

Related information

Six ways to reduce your AWS bill

Optimize and save your IT costs