Developer cuts AWS costs by stress-testing small charges at 100x future scale

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A developer began auditing their AWS bill in June 2026, not to save a few dollars immediately, but to eliminate costs that would become burdensome at 100x usage growth. The largest hidden expense was a NAT Gateway automatically created by AWS CDK infrastructure defaults, costing $58–66 per month despite providing no functional value to the project. An Amplify build pipeline, a health-check Lambda running every 15 minutes, and 820,000 rows of unused data in a dev environment were also identified as silent cost drivers. Fixes included explicitly setting NAT gateways to zero, switching from git-linked auto-builds to promoting a single artifact, and stopping the Lambda from repeatedly scanning a 1.22GB DynamoDB index. The exercise also revealed that a cost dashboard was inflating one provider's charge by 100x, highlighting that even the monitoring tools used to track spending can be unreliable.

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