what you can take off an AWS bill in 2026
unverified — pure usage-based pricing, no single per-unit list price
AWS has no single list price to benchmark against; waste for small teams is dominated by idle/oversized instances and unused reserved capacity, not sticker price.
your own AWS bill, priced
This line is metered, so there is no per-seat price to multiply. Type what you spend a month and we apply the discounts AWS publishes for itself. Every percentage below is linked to the vendor's own page, checked 3-12 Sep 2026.
- fact30% off 55% of the line = $4,752/yrmove steady-state compute onto a 1-year Compute Savings Plan, no upfrontassuming just over half the bill is compute that runs all monthAWS publishes up to 66% off on-demand; its own rate table lists 27-38% for the instance families a startup actually runs
- fact20% off 12% of the line = $691/yrconvert gp2 volumes to gp3assuming block storage is about an eighth of the billAWS list price: gp3 $0.08 vs gp2 $0.10 per GB-month
- estimate35% off 12% of the line = $1,209/yrswitch off what nobody uses — idle dev environments, unattached volumes, forgotten snapshots, idle NAT gatewaysassuming an eighth of the bill is resources nobody is usingthese are the standard idle-resource checks in AWS's own Cost Optimization Hub; the share recovered is our estimate, not an AWS figure
| if you spend | per year | recoverable |
|---|---|---|
| $1,000/mo | $12,000/yr | $2,772/yr |
| $2,500/mo | $30,000/yr | $6,929/yr |
| $5,000/mo | $60,000/yr | $13,859/yr |
| $10,000/mo | $120,000/yr | $27,719/yr |
The discount on each lever is AWS's own published figure. What we are assuming is how much of your bill each lever reaches — that share is printed beside every lever, and a real invoice is the only thing that corrects it.
what companies your size actually pay
We have read 1 AWS invoice so far, fewer than the five we require before publishing a range. Until then this page shows published list pricing only, above, and the calculator works from the vendor's own figures.
the levers that work
- Reserved Instances / Savings Plans can cut compute cost 30-70% vs on-demand for steady workloads
- right-sizing instances and turning off idle dev/staging environments overnight/weekends is the single biggest lever for small teams
- AWS Activate credits for startups can offset early-stage spend substantially
the closest alternatives, priced
| provider | published price | source |
|---|---|---|
| Google Cloud Platform | usage-based, similar structure | link |
| DigitalOcean | flat droplet pricing from $4/mo | link |
A published price is not a quote. In a full audit we email the alternative as a disclosed agent for your company and get a real price for your exact usage — which is the number your incumbent actually responds to.
see what the rest of your stack should cost.
Drop last quarter's invoices. We name every line you are overpaying, with an annualized amount, free. The full audit is $299 once: it gets a real quote from the alternative for your exact usage and runs the renegotiation with your incumbent until there is an answer. If it does not identify at least $2,990/yr, we refund it in full. costexplorer is built and run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is how every figure on this page gets re-read.
start an auditAWS is a trademark of its owner. SpendAudit is not affiliated with, endorsed by or a reseller for any vendor on this page. Prices are the vendor's own published figures, checked 25 Aug 2026, and change without notice.