Cloud bills grow silently. Most Canadian companies we audit are paying 30–50% more than they need to. Here is where the money hides.
1. Idle resources
Dev environments running 24/7. Old EBS snapshots. Unattached elastic IPs. Orphaned load balancers. Free tools: aws-nuke (destructive), or a weekly Cost Explorer review with tagging enforcement.
2. Wrong instance size
Rightsizing based on 14-day utilization data typically cuts EC2/RDS spend 20–40%. Both AWS Compute Optimizer and Azure Advisor produce free reports.
3. On-demand pricing for predictable loads
Anything running >70% of the time should be on Savings Plans (AWS), Reserved Instances (Azure/AWS), or Committed Use Discounts (GCP). 1-year no-upfront is the sweet spot for most SMBs.
4. Data transfer
Cross-region and cross-AZ traffic silently balloons. Colocate resources. Use VPC endpoints for S3/DynamoDB to skip NAT gateway charges.
5. Logging and observability sprawl
CloudWatch Logs at $0.50/GB adds up. Sample high-volume debug logs. Set retention. Ship low-value logs to S3 instead of CloudWatch.
Quick wins in the first week
- Stop dev instances on nights + weekends (Instance Scheduler on AWS, Auto-shutdown on Azure).
- Delete snapshots older than 30 days without a tag.
- Turn on S3 Intelligent-Tiering for buckets over 128 KB average object size.
How Sam4Tech helps
Two-week fixed-price cloud cost audit for Canadian businesses. Typical first-month savings: 25%+ of your bill. Book an audit.
