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

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.

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 to see how we can reduce your cloud costs while boosting performance and scalability.