Cloud costs are one of the fastest-growing line items for any scaling SaaS company. In this guide, we walk through the five levers every cloud-heavy engineering team should pull before their next budget review.
1. Rightsizing compute
The single biggest source of waste in most AWS accounts is overprovisioned EC2 instances. Start by pulling a Cost Explorer report filtered by service and usage type, then cross-reference with actual CPU and memory utilization from CloudWatch.
2. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans
On-demand pricing is a premium. Once you have 90 days of baseline usage data, commit to a 1-year Savings Plan for your steady-state workloads. This alone typically saves 30-40%.
3. Eliminate idle resources
Orphaned EBS volumes, unused Elastic IPs, and stopped instances continue to incur charges. A monthly automated audit via AWS Config or a tool like Ohveda’s FinOps dashboard pays for itself immediately.
4. Optimize data transfer costs
Data transfer — especially cross-AZ and egress to the internet — is frequently overlooked. Review VPC flow logs to identify unexpected data movement patterns.
5. Tag everything and allocate costs
Without tagging, you cannot identify which team, product, or customer is driving cloud spend. Implement a mandatory tagging policy and surface cost per customer in your dashboards.
Ready to reduce your cloud bill by 20-40% in 90 days? Book a free architecture review with Ohveda.