From $820 to $92: How A Startup Cut Cloud Costs by 88%

#finops #cloud #aws #terraform

Last night my foreign cousin was sharing his startup story with me.

Things were going well — their product was gaining users, the team was excited… but then he mentioned the AWS cloud bill. What began as a few hundred dollars a month had suddenly ballooned into the thousands. For a small team, that’s brutal.

This isn’t rare. Startups (and small teams) often scale the product faster than they manage costs. The good news: most cloud-cost problems are straightforward to fix. Here’s a simple, non-overwhelming checklist that actually works.

1. Don’t Over-Engineer for Small Teams

A classic money trap is spinning up production-grade infrastructure for non-critical tasks. I’ve seen early-stage teams launch a full-blown EKS cluster just to run CI/CD pipelines. That’s like renting an office tower just to store sticky notes.

👉 Fix: For testing and pipelines, use Kind, Minikube, or even lightweight managed CI/CD tools. Keep Kubernetes clusters for production workloads — not for experimenting.

2. Right-Size Your Instances

My cousin had several servers idling at ~20% CPU — like renting a conference hall for one person.

👉 Fix: Move to smaller instance types, enable auto-scaling, and review sizing monthly. Don’t pay for unused headroom.

3. Implement Scheduling Tools

Think of this as flipping off the lights when you leave the office. Non-critical resources (like test databases or staging VMs) don’t need to run during nights and weekends.

👉 Fix: Use scheduling tools (like AWS Instance Scheduler, Azure Automation, or GCP Scheduler) to shut things down during off-hours.

4. Automate Non-Prod Shutdowns

Dev and staging environments don’t need to run 24/7. Yet many teams forget to turn them off.

👉 Fix: Schedule automatic stop/start (nights, weekends) or use ephemeral environments spun up by CI.

5. Use Discounted Options Wisely

Paying list price for everything is expensive. There are cheaper options if you plan a bit.

👉 Fix:

Reserved instances for predictable, long-running workloads.
Spot/preemptible instances for batch jobs, CI runs, or anything that can tolerate interruptions.

6. Cut Data Transfer (Egress) Costs

Cross-region traffic and uncontrolled log shipping can surprise you. My cousin’s service was shuttling logs between regions — huge egress fees.

👉 Fix: Co-locate services in the same region, use a CDN for static assets, compress or batch logs, and avoid unnecessary cross-region calls.

7. Cache, Cache, Cache

Serving the same data repeatedly from compute or the origin costs more than a cache.

👉 Fix: Add caching for frequently requested items (CDN, Redis, in-memory caches). It reduces compute and bandwidth.

8. Leverage Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Manual provisioning often leads to forgotten, duplicate, or oversized resources. IaC keeps things clean and repeatable.

👉 Fix: Use Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi to define infrastructure. This ensures resources are consistently right-sized and prevents accidental overspending.

9. Spot the “Zombie” Resources

Old test servers, forgotten storage buckets, and unused IPs quietly drain money.

👉 Fix: Do a weekly cleanup. If you can’t explain a resource in 60 seconds, stop it or tag it for deletion.

10. Set Budgets and Alerts (and Enforce Them)

The easiest prevention is a simple alert before things spiral. Too many teams treat budget alerts as optional.

👉 Fix: Configure cost alerts that notify the team and enforce escalation (Slack + email + owner). Treat alerts like production incidents.

🚀 Quick Results You Can Expect

Apply these fixes and you’ll usually see 20–50% savings within a month. My cousin implemented these and cut their monthly bill by nearly half — money that went straight into hiring and product improvements.