← Insights  ·  July 2026 · 6 min read

5 AWS Cost Quick Wins You Can Ship This Week

None of these require an architecture review, a committee, or a maintenance window worth fearing. Together they routinely take 5–15% off a mid-size AWS bill.

1. Migrate gp2 volumes to gp3

gp3 storage is roughly 20% cheaper per GB than gp2, and every gp3 volume includes a 3,000 IOPS / 125 MB/s baseline regardless of size. On gp2, IOPS scale with volume size, which is why so many teams run oversized volumes just to get performance.

The migration is a live ModifyVolume operation. No downtime, no detach, no snapshot dance. For most fleets this is the single fastest storage win available. The only volumes that need thought are very large ones with high provisioned-performance needs, and even those usually come out cheaper after you provision the extra IOPS explicitly.

2. Delete orphaned EBS volumes and unattached snapshots

Every environment we audit has them: volumes in available state from terminated instances, and snapshot chains nobody has looked at since the instance they came from was decommissioned. An available volume bills at full price forever.

• List volumes with state available across all regions. Snapshot them if you're nervous, then delete.
• Use Data Lifecycle Manager or a retention policy for snapshots instead of keeping them indefinitely.

3. Hunt down idle public IPv4 addresses

Since AWS started charging for every public IPv4 address (about $3.60/month each), idle Elastic IPs and unnecessary public addresses have become real line items. A hundred forgotten IPs is over $4,300 a year for literally nothing.

Public IP Insights inside Amazon VPC IP Address Manager shows exactly what you hold and what's idle. Release what you don't use, and check whether services behind load balancers need public IPs at all.

4. Schedule your non-production environments

A week has 168 hours. Your developers use dev and QA for maybe 50 of them. If non-prod runs 24/7, you're paying roughly 3x more than needed for those environments.

Instance Scheduler on AWS, or a simple Lambda plus EventBridge rule, stops instances at night and on weekends. RDS instances can be stopped too. For most mid-market accounts, non-prod is 20–35% of total spend, so cutting its runtime by two-thirds is one of the biggest levers available.

5. Add S3 lifecycle policies

S3 Standard is the default and the most expensive place data can sit. Most buckets accumulate logs, exports, and backups that nobody reads after 30 days.

• Unknown access patterns: turn on Intelligent-Tiering and let AWS move objects automatically.
• Known patterns: transition to Standard-IA at 30 days, Glacier tiers after 90–180, Deep Archive for compliance retention.
• Watch minimum storage durations and small-object overhead before archiving millions of tiny files.

The catch

These five are the floor, not the ceiling. The bigger money (rightsizing, commitment coverage, architecture-level waste) takes a real audit of your Cost & Usage Report. But if your team ships just the five items above, you'll likely see the bill drop this month, and you'll have built the muscle for the deeper work.

Written by Ruben Rivero, AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional. 12+ years running enterprise AWS environments.