I finally sat down and did a proper audit of my AWS account. I knew I had projects running and services connected to my domains, but I had never actually gone line by line through the bill. When I did, I found $13.16 in charges across four separate services, some of which I did not even know were running.
Here is what I found and what I did about it.
AWS is not one bill. It is a lot of meters running at the same time.
Every service you spin up has its own pricing. I had four separate things billing me and I only really understood one of them.
EC2 — $8.25
A virtual Linux server running in US East Ohio. I spun this up for a study group project and forgot about it. EC2 charges by the hour whether anyone is using it or not. It does not care about traffic. It is a server and it is on until you turn it off.
VPC Public IP — $3.67
This one surprised me the most. AWS started charging for public IPv4 addresses in 2024. My EC2 instance had one attached and I had no idea it was a separate charge. It was just sitting there costing money.
Route 53 — $1.01
This is AWS's DNS service. I have two domains and each one has its own hosted zone. Fifty cents per hosted zone per month plus a small amount for DNS queries.
Amplify — $0.23
This was actually a good surprise. I did not realize I was using Amplify at all. Turns out one of my sites runs through it. Because it is a static site with low traffic, the cost was almost nothing.
What I did
The EC2 instance was for a study group project that is on hold right now. It was not serving any live site. I confirmed my actual portfolio still loaded fine without it, so I stopped it.
Stopping and terminating are not the same thing.
Stop powers it off and saves your work. A small storage charge still runs.
Terminate deletes everything permanently and stops all charges.
I stopped it.
My bill goes from $13.16 to about $1.64 next month.
What I took away from this
The money was not even the main thing. It was realizing I had services running that I did not fully understand. Now I know that EC2 is a full virtual server and it is overkill for a static site. Amplify is the better tool for that because it is built on S3 and CloudFront and handles the deployment for you. Public IP addresses cost money now even when nothing is running. And reading your bill line by line is actually a skill worth building early.
I am working through the Cloud Resume Challenge and building toward my AWS certifications. This was not a planned lesson but it ended up being one of the more useful things I have done.
If you are early in your cloud learning go open your bill. You might be surprised by what you find.
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