When the client came to us, they were spending $12,000/month on AWS. Their app had 5,000 daily active users — a perfectly reasonable load that should cost a fraction of that.
What we found
After a 2-day audit, the issues were clear: over-provisioned EC2 instances, no auto-scaling, RDS running 24/7 for a dev environment, and 2TB of forgotten S3 data from 2021.
What we did
- Moved to right-sized instances with auto-scaling
- Switched dev DB to Aurora Serverless (pay per query)
- Cleaned up S3 and set lifecycle policies
- Moved static assets to CloudFront
Total time: 3 weeks. New monthly bill: $4,800. That's $86,400 saved per year.