Managing cloud spend is a daily reality for companies using Amazon Web Services. Even teams with a defined cloud budget often face unexpected charges and unpredictable billing cycles. Real-time remediation becomes difficult, costs accumulate quietly, and the AWS bill begins to exceed expectations.

No matter where your company is in its cloud journey, reducing AWS spend is an ongoing responsibility. In earlier posts, we covered how AWS cost management works and shared operational best practices. This article builds on those foundations and provides ten additional strategies to lower your AWS bill in a sustainable way. More importantly, it explains why optimising your cloud environment, rather than simply cutting resources, delivers greater long-term value.

1. Start optimising your AWS costs immediately

Many startups focus on boosting monthly recurring revenue instead of strengthening gross margins. However, even a small improvement in gross margin can significantly increase a company's valuation and ability to raise capital.

A common assumption is that margins automatically improve as a SaaS company grows. In reality, controlling AWS costs often becomes tougher as you scale because your infrastructure footprint expands and becomes more complex.

This is why monitoring AWS usage early is important. The sooner you understand where your spending goes, the sooner you can optimise it. You can begin with native AWS tools and later upgrade to a more advanced platform like Opslyft. In fact, many companies adopt Opslyft early because the platform scales with them as their cloud architecture grows.

2. Use unit cost analysis to make smart, strategic decisions

Traditional AWS cost tools often provide only high-level totals or averages. They do not reveal what individual features, teams, tenants, or environments cost to operate. Without this visibility, it becomes difficult to reduce spend without hurting product performance or slowing innovation.

Unit cost analysis solves this problem. It links AWS resource usage to the exact people, products, and processes that drive it. With this insight, you can answer questions such as:

• How much does each customer or tenant cost to support
• What is the cost of each product feature?
• How much each engineering project contributes to the total cloud spend

This depth of visibility allows your team to decide where to optimise without reducing performance, delaying releases, or undermining security initiatives. You can compare return on investment across cost centres and make decisions based on measurable business impact.

3. Review and complete the traditional AWS cost optimisation checklist

There are several well-known cost-saving actions that every AWS user should review regularly. These include:

• Use AWS Auto Scaling to match capacity with demand
• Delete unused resources, including unattached EBS volumes, old snapshots, idle load balancers, inactive EC2 instances, and orphaned Elastic IPs
• Set schedules to start and stop non-production instances only during working hours
• Rightsize compute instances and automate this process with a third-party tool
• Act on recommendations for Reserved Instances and Savings Plans using a platform such as ProsperOps
• Repurpose underutilised Reserved Instances
• Remove Customer Master Keys that belong to users who no longer need them
• Store archival data in Amazon Glacier instead of Amazon S3 or EBS
• Use Spot Instances instead of On-Demand whenever possible
• Pause unused RedShift clusters
• Enable anomaly detection alerts to catch spending spikes
• Use older instance types when performance requirements allow it
• Use private IP addresses to lower intraregional data transfer fees

AWS also introduces new discounts periodically, which you should take advantage of whenever applicable.

4. Automate switching between On-Demand and Spot Instances

Spot Instances provide the largest cost savings compared to On-Demand, Reserved Instances, and Savings Plans. They are excellent for machine learning workloads, CI and CD pipelines, distributed databases, and big data processing.

The challenge is timing. Spot capacity fluctuates, and switching between Spot and On-Demand too fast can cause downtime.

Tools like Xosphere Instance Orchestrator make this process automatic. They switch workloads between instance types with minimal disruption and can save up to 90 per cent compared to On-Demand pricing.

5. Consolidate all accounts under a single AWS Organisation

Combining multiple AWS accounts under one organisation does more than simplify billing. It also helps you unlock volume discounts and consolidate cost reporting.

By setting up AWS Organisations, you centralise payments, manage permissions more efficiently, and share resources across accounts. This reduces overhead and lowers transaction-level spending.

Even relatively small companies that spend millions on AWS can save meaningful amounts through consolidated billing.

6. Fix thrashing Docker containers when using ECS Fargate

Thrashing containers causes high hidden costs. If a container fails to start properly, ECS repeatedly starts a new task. Each attempt pulls the image from Docker Hub or ECR, sometimes consuming terabytes of data in a single billing cycle.

You can detect this behaviour through CloudWatch or a specialised monitoring solution. Fixing thrashing issues prevents unnecessary data transfer charges and reduces wasted compute.

7. Optimise aggressive third-party integrations

Third-party integrations can be expensive when they sync too frequently or consume excessive metrics and data. Frequent syncing increases NAT Gateway charges, CloudWatch metric costs, and data transfer fees.

You can reduce these expenses by:

• Reducing sync frequency
• Limiting the payload size
• Disabling unnecessary premium features

Configuring integrations to the minimum required level can significantly reduce recurring AWS charges.

8. Use Direct Connect or Snowball to cut data transfer costs

Data transfer pricing varies depending on the transfer type, region, and IP addressing method. You can reduce data transfer fees by:

• Keeping data transfers within the same AWS region
• Using private IPs instead of public addresses
• Ensuring transfers happen within a single availability zone
• Minimising outbound traffic

If you need to move data between on-premises and AWS, Direct Connect offers more predictable pricing and potentially lower egress costs.

For transfers of more than 50 terabytes, AWS Snowball is often the cheapest and fastest method. Snowball costs between 200 and 250 dollars per job and delivers your data within about ten days. This is significantly cheaper than transferring large volumes over the internet.

9. Request and track AWS credits

AWS offers several promotional credits that can reduce your bill. Examples include:

• AWS Activate: Up to 100,000 dollars in credits for startups
• AWS Activate Founders: $1,000 in Activate Credits and $350 in Developer Support Credits
• AWS programs for nonprofits and NGOs: Awards ranging from 10,000 to 100,000 dollars in promotional credits, depending on the grant

You may need to provide a business justification to your account manager when requesting credits. Once granted, track your credit usage carefully to avoid expiration. Solutions like Opslyft can help monitor credit consumption, similar to how organisations previously used CloudZero’s MAP Dashboard.

10. Enable real-time cost anomaly detection

Recent industry studies show that nearly half of enterprises and one-third of small businesses saw cloud spend rise by 25 to 50 per cent in the past year. Most of these cost spikes went unnoticed for days or weeks.

In many cases, operations teams were the first to detect the anomalies, followed by engineering and finance. Delays occurred because cost awareness was not shared across departments.

Start by enabling AWS CloudWatch anomaly detection. For more accurate, noise-free alerts, platforms like Opslyft provide real-time notifications through Slack or email so teams can react instantly.

Conclusion: Optimise AWS costs with cloud cost intelligence

These strategies can help you discover meaningful savings across your AWS environment. However, simply cutting infrastructure is rarely the best solution. Reducing resources without context can slow innovation, degrade user experience, and limit your ability to grow.

The smarter approach is to optimise instead of cutting blindly.

Opslyft helps companies implement cloud cost intelligence so they can identify, analyse, and manage cloud costs with precision. You can track usage by customer, project, environment, feature, or team and make informed decisions that do not compromise performance.

With real-time anomaly detection, detailed cost visibility, and budget tracking, Opslyft helps you lower your AWS bill while maintaining the reliability and agility your business depends on.