We've all done it.
You spin up an RDS instance to test something on a Friday afternoon. You attach an EBS volume to a t3.micro that you kill three days later — but the volume just... stays. You allocate a static IP for a load test, and the load test ends, but the IP doesn't know that.
None of this shows up as an error. Nothing crashes. There's no red banner in the console screaming at you. It just quietly sits there, accruing charges, until you open your AWS bill a month later and go "wait, why are we paying for that?"
I call these zombie resources — infrastructure that's technically alive (and billing you) but functionally dead. It's happened to me enough times on side projects and client work that I've started designing a small tool to stop it: CloudZombie.
Heads up: this is early. There's no working product yet — I'm validating the idea and building in the open, starting with a waitlist. If that's not your thing, no hard feelings, but if you've felt this exact pain before, I'd love your take.
The problem, more specifically
Cloud waste isn't usually one big dramatic mistake. It's death by a thousand cuts:
- Orphaned EBS volumes — you terminate an EC2 instance, but the attached volume doesn't get deleted with it, so it just sits in an "available" state forever.
- Idle databases — that staging or QA RDS instance nobody remembers spinning up, quietly running at under 1.5% CPU for weeks.
- Abandoned static IPs and load balancers — cloud providers actually charge more for an Elastic IP that isn't attached to anything, which feels like a small act of cruelty.
Individually, each one is a few dollars a month. Collectively, across a handful of side projects or a growing team's sprawl of staging environments, it adds up to real money leaking out of your runway — with zero warning.
What CloudZombie is meant to do
The plan is for CloudZombie to connect (read-only) to your AWS account and scan specifically for these patterns:
- Unattached EBS volumes sitting idle
- Databases with sustained low CPU utilization over time
- Static IPs and load balancers that aren't routing any traffic
Instead of burying results in a dashboard you'll forget to check, the goal is a direct Slack alert like this mockup:
🚨 CloudZombie Waste Alert (AWS Production)
Detected 3 zombie resources idle for 7 consecutive days:
- vol-08f23ba (EBS Unattached) $42.00/mo
- db-staging-test (RDS Idle <1% CPU) $185.00/mo
- eipalloc-029c (Unattached IP) $7.20/mo
💰 Potential Immediate Savings: $234.20/month
That's the intended experience, not a live screenshot — no generic "cost optimization report," just: here's what's dead, here's what it's costing you, go kill it if you don't need it.
Why not just use a full cloud cost platform
Because most of them are overkill for this exact problem. You don't need a full FinOps suite with tagging strategies and reserved instance recommendations just to find the one EBS volume someone forgot about in March. The idea behind CloudZombie is to stay intentionally narrow — look for the specific, common patterns engineers create by accident, and surface them fast.
On the security side
One thing I know for sure, even at this early stage: I don't want to build (or ask anyone to trust) yet another tool that asks for full AWS access keys. The design calls for connecting via an AWS Cross-Account IAM Role scoped to ReadOnlyAccess only — no write or delete permissions, ever — with one-click revocation from your own AWS console, and an open-source scanning engine so people can verify what it's doing instead of taking my word for it.
Where it's at right now
Honestly? Just an idea, a landing page, and a waitlist. No beta, no code running against real accounts yet. I'm sharing it this early because I'd rather validate whether this pain is real and common before sinking weeks into building it.
Planned pricing (subject to change based on feedback): a free tier for indie/side-project accounts (1 connected account, up to 15 tracked resources, weekly scans), and a paid tier for teams with more active infrastructure wanting continuous daily scans and instant alerts.
If you've ever opened an AWS bill and felt that specific dread of "I have no idea what half of this is," I'd love to know:
- Does this problem actually bug you, or do you already have it handled some other way?
- What other "invisible" waste have you run into that I haven't mentioned?
If you want to be notified when there's something real to try, there's a waitlist here: cloudzombie.tech — but honestly, the comments are just as useful to me right now as the signups.
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