we cut $360/mo of aws waste last week — and we were afraid to touch most of it

Small team, no dedicated cloud person. that's us.

last month our aws spend crept up and we couldn't pin it down. so i sat down, built a checklist, and went through it line by line. found ~$360/mo of pure waste:

- 3 unattached EBS volumes from long-dead instances (we "terminated" but the disks stayed)
- an old lambda version still getting a trickle of invokes
- a nat gateway running for an environment nobody uses anymore
- 40gb of snapshots older than a year, all from pre-launch tests

the harder part wasn't finding them. it was being scared to delete in case something broke.

so i ordered the list by risk: what to delete first, what to check before each one, and what order to do it in. that ordering was the whole game.

I'm the one who built it. your CUR file stays local, nothing leaves your machine. https://getcloudsaver.com

it's not magic. just a safe list so you're not guessing.

what's the dumbest thing you've found wasting money on aws? always curious what others have run into.