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AWS bill sanity check

Answer a few questions about the monthly bill. The notes flag the waste we see most often. This is not a connection to your AWS account, and the answers are not sent to us from this page.

The total stays in your browser. It is only used to phrase the notes. We never ask for an AWS account, a key, or a password.

  • EC2 instances that may be idle

    Servers that stay on with little or no traffic, or ones nobody can name a purpose for.

  • NAT gateways

    A NAT gateway is billed for every hour it exists, plus the data that passes through it.

  • Snapshots older than 90 days

    EBS snapshots you are not sure you still need for a restore.

  • Elastic IPs that are not attached

    A public address that is not on a running instance is billed even though it does no work.

  • Steady usage without a Savings Plan

    Compute you expect to keep running, covered only by on-demand prices.

  • Load balancers with little traffic

    A load balancer with no healthy targets, or one left over from a retired service.

  • Log groups kept forever

    CloudWatch log groups with no retention limit.

  • gp2 volumes that could move to gp3

    Older general-purpose disks. gp3 is usually the cheaper current choice for the same size.

How to use it

  1. Answer the questions from Cost Explorer or the bill, in rand or dollars.
  2. Read the notes that match a yes. Each one names a thing to look up, not a change to make blindly.
  3. Use the JSON API only from an automated client. This page keeps the answers in the browser.

Questions

Does this log in to AWS?
No. There is no account id, access key or role. It is a checklist, not a bill fetched from AWS.
Will this find every wasted rand?
No. It covers the patterns we see most often: idle compute, NAT gateways, old snapshots, unattached addresses and missing savings plans.
Where do the answers go?
On this page they stay in the browser. The separate JSON API returns the same kind of notes and does not store the answers.

An automated client can POST JSON to /api/tools/aws-bill with the fields listed in the OpenAPI document. The OpenAPI document is at /api/tools, with a short guide at /llms.txt. Nothing submitted is stored.

This page keeps the answers in the browser. The JSON API is a separate call for an automated client and returns the same kind of notes. It is a checklist, not a bill fetched from AWS.