How to Make AWS Cheaper for Your Startup

When you're a startup, infrastructure decisions hit differently.

Sure, AWS gives you the gold standard: scalability, security, flexibility, global reach. But it also gives you a heart attack when the first full bill lands in your inbox.

“$3,400 for the month? We barely have a dozen active users!”

I’ve been on both sides, building early products and running backend infra for client-facing IT projects.

And what I’ve seen again and again is that it’s not AWS that’s broken. It’s how most startups and small teams use it.

Let’s unpack how you can still use AWS, but in a way that actually fits your startup budget without downgrading performance, risking security, or migrating to some obscure cloud provider.

Why AWS is expensive (but doesn’t have to be)

AWS gives you every possible service you might need but that’s exactly where things go wrong.

Most startups don’t:

Understand which services are essential vs. overkill
Right-size their infrastructure from the beginning
Turn off unused resources or optimize configurations
Know how to track waste until it’s too late

And to be honest, they shouldn’t have to.

Founders and small tech teams are focused on building, not babysitting infrastructure.

So what happens?

You spin up t3.mediums because you “might” need the extra power. RDS gets a larger instance than you need. You forget to shut down staging or dev environments. And you’re paying on-demand, no discounts, no reserved instances.

That’s how your $200/month estimate turns into $3,000.

A startup’s guide to making AWS affordable

Here’s what actually works and doesn’t require you to be an AWS expert or hire a full-time DevOps engineer.

1. Avoid over-provisioning at launch

You don’t need to build like Netflix from day one.

Start with minimum viable infrastructure. Use burstable instances (like t4g series), enable autoscaling, and configure your workload to fail gracefully, not scale unnecessarily.

2. Automate Cost Controls

If your stack doesn’t automatically scale down, you’re wasting money. Most teams manually scale up and forget to scale down.

This is where AI-powered DevOps tools like Kuberns come in.

Instead of writing cron jobs or Lambda scripts to shut down unused services, we now use AI systems that:

Predict traffic patterns
Allocate resources intelligently
Auto-pause or adjust infra during low usage
Trigger alerts before budget overruns happen

It’s like having an infra analyst on-call 24/7, without the salary.

3. Track usage granularly, not just the monthly bill

One of the biggest mistakes is waiting until the AWS invoice arrives.

Set up granular cost tracking across services. Tools like Cost Explorer, CloudWatch, or even your own metrics dashboard can help. But many startups ignore this step because it feels like extra work.

If you’re using Kuberns, this part is baked in, every deploy shows what you’re using and what it’s costing you.

4. Use smart buy options (without complex commitments)

Most startups stick to on-demand pricing. It’s easy, but expensive.

On the flip side, Reserved Instances or Savings Plans give discounts but lock you in and that’s scary when you’re unsure how fast you’ll grow or pivot.

Some platforms (like Kuberns) pool infrastructure demand across companies to get bulk discounts from AWS and then pass those savings to you. So you're still using AWS, just smarter.

Think of it like using wholesale cloud pricing, without buying in bulk yourself.

5. Don’t stack tools that do the same thing

Here’s a cost trap: you’re using:

AWS CloudWatch for logging
DataDog for monitoring
PagerDuty for alerts
Jenkins for deploys
Terraform for infra-as-code

And maybe another tool for autoscaling. All paid. All separate.

What you need is consolidation. Many AI-powered DevOps platforms bundle deploy, config, monitoring, logging, and scaling in one stack, dramatically reducing tool bloat and cost.

So… Do you need to ditch AWS?

No. Absolutely not.

You don’t need to move to GCP or Azure. You don’t need to rewrite your stack. And you don’t need to settle for lower performance just to stay under budget.

You just need to:

Stop paying retail AWS pricing
Automate optimization
Let AI handle what DevOps scripts used to do manually

Whether you’re running client workloads as an IT agency or building your own SaaS, Kuberns is making this possible by offering AWS at up to 60% less, with all the performance and none of the complexity.