Go to the billing console! When I received an unexpectedly nasty bill from Amazon, my first reaction was to not reopen the email while cursing. “There has to be a mistake…” I say in complete denial. The first step should be to use the billing console on the AWS website to identify where the costs are actually coming from. When I went to mine, I found the following scary picture:

$40 for an app I haven’t even launched, yikes!

From there, I noticed two immediate cost centers: EC2 and Elasticache. That was weird, I thought. I’m not even using any EC2 instances, I’m only using Lambda, and my Redis node in Elasticache only stores 5 strings. How could that be costing me almost $41 a month?!

From the main page I jumped to the dashboard where I could clearly see what was costing me the money:

Aha! My two targets.

I could see that it was clearly two problematic services, my NAT Gateway and my Redis node. With cost reduction in mind, I knew I had my work cut out for me.