How to Reduce AWS Cost: Practical Steps Every Business Can Use

Key Highlights

• Controlling rising AWS costs is a major challenge for businesses of all sizes, from freelancers to large enterprises.
• Effective cost optimisation involves more than just cutting spend; it’s about maximising the value of your cloud investment.
• Key strategies include right-sizing instances, leveraging spot instances, and using appropriate storage tiers to manage AWS resources.
• Manual AWS cost management is complex, but AI-driven automation can simplify the process and unlock deeper savings.
• Platforms like Kuberns automate these optimisations, helping you reduce your AWS bill without sacrificing performance.

Introduction:

If you’re looking to reduce AWS costs, you’re in the right place. Many businesses find themselves facing unexpectedly high AWS bills, wondering how they got there. Have you noticed your monthly AWS charges creeping up, despite your best efforts to stay on top of things?

AWS offers powerful tools, but without the right approach, it’s easy to pay for resources you aren’t fully using. Whether it’s over-provisioned EC2 instances, underutilised storage, or idle services, these small inefficiencies add up quickly.

The result? A cloud bill that’s far higher than it needs to be.

It’s a common challenge, whether you’re a freelancer managing a side project, a startup trying to stretch your runway, an agency balancing multiple client accounts, or an enterprise with complex workloads.

But the good news is, reducing AWS costs isn’t about cutting corners.

It’s about making sure you’re only paying for the resources you actually use and optimising your cloud environment for maximum efficiency.

And you don’t have to sacrifice performance or security to do it.

Check out this article to know how you can reduce AWS Costs with AI optimisation.

What Drives High Costs on AWS? (And How to Control Them)

The most common drivers of high AWS costs are often hidden in plain sight. Over-provisioned resources, where you pay for more capacity than you actually use, are a primary culprit. Idle instances, unattached storage volumes, and inefficient data transfer practices also contribute significantly to a bloated bill.

Many businesses simply “set and forget” their resources, leading to unchecked AWS spending.

If you’ve noticed your AWS costs creeping up, you’re likely facing one (or several) of the common cost drivers that many businesses struggle with. AWS provides a lot of power, but it’s easy to end up paying for more than you need if your resources aren’t properly managed.

Let’s take a look at the main culprits:

EC2 Cost Reduction: Right-Sizing and Spot Instances

EC2 instances are one of the most expensive AWS services, and it’s easy to over-provision them. Many companies start with larger instances than they actually need, or leave instances running when they’re no longer in use. The result? Paying for far more computing power than necessary.

You might have started with large instances to ensure you have enough capacity, but over time, those resources might no longer be required, leaving you with a hefty bill for unused capacity.

How to Control It: Manually managing EC2 instances can be a challenge. Right-sizing instances, setting up auto-scaling, and ensuring that unused instances are terminated can help reduce costs, but these tasks are time-consuming and prone to human error.

S3 Cost Optimisation: Lifecycle Policies and Storage Tiers

S3 storage is incredibly flexible, but without proper management, it’s easy to end up paying for more storage than you actually need. Perhaps you’re storing old files in expensive storage tiers, or your data lifecycle isn’t properly configured, causing unnecessary storage fees to pile up.

How to Control It: In AWS, you’d have to manually configure lifecycle policies, tier your storage properly, and regularly audit your data usage. But this can become a complex and ongoing task, especially as your data grows. You need tools that continuously optimise storage based on usage patterns.

Lambda Cost Management: Optimising Serverless Architecture

AWS Lambda is often seen as a cost-effective solution for serverless computing, but it’s easy to overspend if your functions aren’t optimised. Longer execution times, unnecessary invocations, and misconfigured memory allocation can quickly drive up Lambda costs.

How to Control It: It requires regular monitoring and tweaking to make sure your functions are optimised. You can use AWS CloudWatch and other tools to adjust memory and execution time, but managing these resources effectively requires deep knowledge and ongoing manual oversight.

So, What’s the Smarter Way to Control AWS Costs?

AWS provides plenty of ways to cut costs, but the reality is that it’s not “set it and forget it.” Each solution comes with trade-offs, manual setup, constant monitoring, and the risk of mistakes.

That’s why many teams, from startups to enterprises, look for smarter platforms that can automate optimisation and handle these controls behind the scenes, so they can focus on building their product instead of babysitting cloud resources.

Kuberns is one such platform that simplifies AWS cost optimisation by automatically managing EC2 instances, storage, and Lambda functions for you.

Instead of manually configuring and monitoring everything, Kuberns uses AI-powered algorithms to ensure that your resources are always right-sized, your storage is optimised, and your AWS usage is efficient.

How Kuberns Can Help You Save Up to 40% on AWS Costs?

The strategies we’ve discussed are powerful, but implementing them manually across your entire infrastructure can be overwhelming. This is where modern automation platforms come in.

Instead of you constantly monitoring and tweaking, these tools handle the heavy lifting of cost optimisation in the background, ensuring you’re always running efficiently.

Kuberns is designed to deliver AWS infrastructure at up to 40% lower cost by automating these best practices. It simplifies cloud cost management by handling everything from resource procurement to scaling, allowing your team to focus on building products instead of managing infrastructure.

It acts as your automated FinOps team, working 24/7 to lower your AWS cost management burden.

Dynamic AWS Procurement

One of the biggest challenges for a single business is fully utilising commitment-based discounts like Reserved Instances and AWS Savings Plans. You might not have enough predictable, long-term usage to make the commitment worthwhile, or your needs might change, leaving you with unused reservations.

Kuberns solves this problem by aggregating demand from all its users. This large-scale, predictable usage allows Kuberns to commit to AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances at a massive scale, securing the highest possible discount tiers from AWS. It then passes these savings directly on to you, even for workloads that are short-lived or unpredictable. You get the benefit of enterprise-level discounts without any of the long-term commitment or risk.

This approach to AWS cost management means you’re no longer leaving money on the table. You simply deploy your applications, and Kuberns ensures you’re paying the lowest possible rate for the underlying AWS services.

AI-Powered Optimization

Does AI really help reduce AWS bills? Absolutely.

AI-powered cost optimisation goes beyond simple automation by using machine learning to make intelligent, predictive decisions about your infrastructure. Kuberns’ AI engine continuously analyses your application’s workload patterns to ensure your AWS resources are perfectly matched to your needs.

Instead of reactive auto scaling that only kicks in when traffic spikes, Kuberns uses predictive scaling to prepare your environment before demand changes. It also automatically rightsizes your workloads, eliminating the waste from over-provisioning. Furthermore, the platform identifies and shuts down idle or zombie resources that contribute to unnecessary AWS spending, like development environments left running over the weekend.

This intelligent automation works silently in the background, providing a level of optimisation that is nearly impossible to achieve manually.

• Predictive Scaling: Adjusts resources ahead of traffic changes.
• Automated Rightsizing: Ensures you’re never paying for unused capacity.
• Idle Resource Termination: Automatically shuts down wasteful resources.

No Platform Fees

One of the most common mistakes in AWS cost management is adopting tools that add yet another layer of cost. Many Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions or management tools come with their own platform fees or a percentage-based markup on top of your cloud spend. This can eat into your savings, making you question if the tool is worth it.

Kuberns operates on a fundamentally different model. There are no platform fees and no markup. You only pay for the optimised AWS costs of the resources you use. The savings are generated by making your infrastructure more efficient, not by adding another line item to your AWS bill.

This transparent approach ensures that all the benefits of the AI-powered optimisation and dynamic procurement are passed directly to you. You get the simplicity of a managed platform and significant reductions in your cloud costs without any hidden fees. It’s a straightforward path to a lower bill.

Unified Deployment and Hosting

Kuberns isn’t just about saving on compute; it combines CI/CD, scaling, monitoring, and hosting in one place. Your team might be juggling a CI/CD tool, a separate monitoring solution, a logging service, and manually managing the underlying cloud infrastructure. Each of these tools comes with its own subscription cost, learning curve, and integration overhead, complicating your cloud cost management.

Kuberns consolidates all these functions into a single, unified platform. It combines automated deployment pipelines (CI/CD), intelligent scaling, integrated monitoring, and infrastructure management in one place. By doing so, it eliminates the need for multiple third-party tools, saving you both money and engineering time.

This unified approach simplifies your entire workflow. Your team can deploy, manage, and monitor their applications from a single dashboard, with the confidence that the underlying AWS resources and AWS services are being optimised for cost and performance automatically.

• Integrated CI/CD: Automate builds and deployments without a separate tool.
• Built-in Monitoring: Get visibility into application performance and costs.
• Simplified Management: Control your entire stack from one interface.

Fit for Different Teams

Effective cost optimisation isn’t one-size-fits-all. Different teams have different priorities, and a good solution should cater to them. Kuberns is designed to provide specific benefits, whether you’re a solo developer or a large enterprise.

For freelancers and small businesses, the primary benefit is predictability. A stable, lower AWS bill makes budgeting easier and removes the fear of surprise charges.

Startups, on the other hand, can extend their runway by drastically cutting AWS spending, allowing them to invest more capital into product development and growth. For agencies managing multiple client projects, Kuberns offers efficiency, simplifying the management of diverse workloads on a single platform.

Enterprises benefit from simplified FinOps and governance.

The platform automates best practices across the organisation, ensuring cost-effective cloud infrastructure without complex policy enforcement.

• Freelancers: Predictable monthly bills.
• Startups: Extended runway and capital efficiency.
• Agencies: Simplified management of multiple client accounts.
• Enterprises: Automated FinOps and governance at scale.

Real-World Example of Cost Reduction by Kuberns

The theory of cost management is great, but seeing it in action provides real clarity.

Imagine an IT services company running dozens of applications for its clients on AWS. Their monthly AWS costs were unpredictable, often spiking due to unmanaged development environments and over-provisioned production AWS resources.

Their engineers spent a significant amount of time trying to manually optimise their infrastructure, pulling them away from client-facing work.

This scenario is incredibly common.

Without a centralised and automated AWS cost management strategy, costs naturally inflate over time. The team struggled to balance performance with budget, often choosing to over-provision to avoid downtime, which only made the problem worse.

They needed a solution that could provide savings without adding to their operational workload.

Kuberns helped an IT company save costs on cloud by 40%

A major IT company was struggling with escalating cloud bills, causing headaches for its finance team.

They approached us with their problem, and we came up with a solution that not only gave them an optimised AWS infrastructure but also 40% savings on cloud instantly.

When they moved to Kuberns, two big things changed.

First, their workloads were shifted onto reserved AWS capacity through Kuberns’ dynamic procurement, immediately lowering their baseline compute costs. Second, the AI-driven optimisation started monitoring and right-sizing resources in real time, scaling them up only when needed and shutting down idle ones.

The result? Their AWS spend dropped by almost 40%, without any drop in performance or reliability.

This example shows how cost reduction isn’t about cutting corners; it’s about smarter resource management.

For many businesses, that level of savings can mean healthier profit margins, a longer runway, or more room to invest back into growth.

Conclusion: Smarter AWS Savings for Every Business

Cutting AWS costs is possible with rightsizing, storage policies, and serverless tuning, but these fixes require constant monitoring and expertise.

For many teams, the bigger challenge isn’t knowing what to do; it’s having the time and bandwidth to actually do it.

AWS cost optimisation is essential, but it shouldn’t require a full-time effort. With Kuberns, you can reduce AWS costs by up to 40% without needing to dive deep into the complexities of AWS management.

If you’re serious about reducing AWS cost, the smartest move is to pair AWS best practices with automation that works for you. That’s exactly what Kuberns is designed to do.

Ready to start saving on AWS?
Visit Kuberns today to learn more about how we can help you cut your AWS bill by up to 40%. With Kuberns, cloud cost savings are just a click away.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the fastest way to reduce AWS costs?

The quickest way is to use Kuberns. It runs your apps on optimised AWS infrastructure with AI-driven scaling, so savings start instantly without manual setup.

How can startups reduce AWS costs without losing performance?

Startups can save by combining AWS best practices with Kuberns. It keeps workloads efficient and bills predictable while maintaining performance.

Does AI really help reduce AWS bills?

Yes. AI spots idle resources and rightsizes workloads automatically. Kuberns uses this to cut up to 40% from AWS costs without extra effort.

What is the most common mistake businesses make with AWS cost management?

Relying on one-time fixes. Costs creep back unless they’re monitored continuously. Kuberns automates this process so savings stick.