Cloud costs: what we cut first

Infrastructure bills rarely grow because of traffic. They grow because nothing is ever turned off. Our first pass on any cost review is an inventory of what is running and who last touched it.

The biggest single win on a recent engagement was egress: images served at full resolution from the origin on every request. A CDN with sensible cache headers and responsive variants removed a third of the bill on its own.

Second was environment sprawl. Four staging environments, each a full production replica, running twenty-four hours a day for a team in one timezone. Scheduled shutdown outside working hours cost nothing to implement.

Third was database sizing. Instances provisioned for a launch-day spike that never returned. Rightsizing with headroom, plus read replicas only where reads actually dominate, closed the remaining gap to 41%.