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Secrets Manager bills $0.40 per secret a month plus API calls, and the total climbs faster than it looks like it should. Here's where the money actually goes.
Backup and snapshot storage keeps billing long after the volume or database it protected is gone — where the money hides, and how to find the orphaned copies.
Standard RIs lock to an instance family for up to 72% off; Savings Plans track spend instead, for a bit less. The trade-off, and which one fits your usage.
ECS orchestration itself is free — every dollar lands under EC2 or Fargate instead. Here's where ECS spend actually accumulates, and how to tell if you're paying for slack.
An EKS bill is at least three separate meters — control plane, workers, and add-ons — and none of them show up as one line. Here's how to add them up.
RDS Reserved Instances save 30-69% depending on term and upfront payment, but the discount is locked to one engine and instance family for one to three years.
A Savings Plan pays off the moment your usage covers about a third of what you committed to. Below that line, the unused commitment is pure loss.
EKS charges $73–438 a month just for the control plane; ECS charges nothing extra. Here's what that fee actually buys, and when it's worth paying.
EC2 bills by the instance-hour whether or not it's busy. Fargate bills by the vCPU-second a task actually runs. Here's the arithmetic and where each wins.
Aurora's storage and I/O model is only part of the story. Reader instances, Serverless v2's idle floor, and Global Database quietly add their own charges.
ElastiCache bills by the node-hour, or by GB-hour and ECPU on Serverless — two different meters. Here's what each one actually charges, node type by node type.
Aurora and RDS price compute almost identically, but storage, I/O, and backups work completely differently. Here's the mechanics that actually decide your bill.