5 minutes read

Nov 10, 2025

# Cutting $50K to $4K per month: Cloud Cost Optimization Lessons from the Field

\
Augusto Ruibal
\
CTO

In today’s cloud-first world, infrastructure is easy to scale—and just as easy to overspend on. Many companies unknowingly rack up huge monthly bills simply by sticking with default setups, over-provisioning environments, or failing to reassess their architecture as usage evolves.

At 10 Grounds, we recently helped a company reduce their AWS bill from **$50,000 to just $4,000 per month**. Here’s how we did it—and what you can learn from it.

## **The Audit: Real-World Inefficiencies We Uncovered**

This company had multiple products, environments, and teams. Over time, the infrastructure grew organically but inefficiently. Here's what we found:

- **$8K Java + Kubernetes Stack**: One product ran on a costly Java/Kubernetes setup. By auditing the workload, we migrated it to **AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS)** and eliminated unnecessary services—bringing the cost down to **$1,000/month**.

- **Idle Development Environments**: A product not even in production had both development and production environments fully deployed—complete with load balancers and large EC2 instances. We **downsized to minimal capacity**, saving thousands.

- **Overscaled Production Redundancy**: Another production system had **8 load-balanced servers** for moderate traffic and a bloated dev environment. We right-sized it to **4 servers**, reducing costs while maintaining resilience.

## **Key Principles for Cloud Cost Optimization**

### **1\. MVP Applies to Infrastructure Too**  
Don’t just apply "Minimum Viable Product" to software features—apply it to cloud architecture. Start lean, prove value, and scale when usage demands it.

### **2\. Cost Awareness Is Part of Engineering**  
It’s not enough to "do what you’re told." True partners challenge assumptions and recommend smarter, more efficient paths forward.

### **3\. Infrastructure-as-Code = Portability + Control**  
We used **Terraform** to manage every change. This gave us full visibility, version control, and **cloud-provider flexibility**, allowing us to build an architecture that was efficient **and** future-proof.

### **4\. Automation Doesn’t Mean Invisibility**  
CI/CD and auto-scaling are powerful, but they can also hide waste if not reviewed. Make auditing a regular part of your [devops workflow](/content/infrastructure-services/index.html).

## **What This Means for You**

If your AWS (or any cloud provider) bill feels high, it probably is. A combination of legacy choices, oversized resources, and "set-and-forget" deployments often leads to waste.

At 10 Grounds, we help businesses **reduce cloud costs without sacrificing performance or security**. Whether it's re-architecting Kubernetes workloads or auditing idle environments, we bring a pragmatic, value-driven mindset to infrastructure.

Let’s make your cloud work smarter—and cheaper.

> 👉 [Schedule a call with our team](/content/contact-us/index.html) to see how we can reduce your cloud costs while boosting performance and scalability.