AWS: The bill that never ends¶

Based on this pipeline (so just a starter pipeline): Basis for a secure AWS deployment pipeline , these are guesstimates for comparison.

Best case – Minimal, disciplined setup¶

€145/month

• Compute (t3.small EC2, build agents): €35

• S3 (standard & infrequent access): €15

• Egress (CI/CD logs, artefacts): €25

• Lambda + API Gateway: €20

• CloudWatch (trimmed logs): €15

• IAM, Route53, etc: free* (*until you need them properly)

You’ve tagged everything. You delete temp resources. You even shut down dev at night. You’re either a unicorn or terrified of your CFO.

Worst case – The Dev left some EC2s up edition¶

€340/month

• Compute (EC2, Lambda, forgotten staging VMs): €95

• S3 (non-expiring buckets, versioning enabled): €35

• Egress (artifacts, preview deploys, Slack images): €75

• CloudWatch logs (left at debug): €50

• NAT Gateway: €45

• RDS test DB no one uses: €40

Every NAT Gateway is a slow financial haemorrhage. CloudWatch stores every sneeze. Welcome to the billing dungeon.