{"id":17507,"date":"2026-04-01T16:14:04","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T10:44:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.skynats.com\/blog\/?p=17507"},"modified":"2026-04-01T16:14:06","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T10:44:06","slug":"how-we-reduced-a-clients-cloud-bill-by-40-on-aws","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.skynats.com\/blog\/how-we-reduced-a-clients-cloud-bill-by-40-on-aws\/","title":{"rendered":"How We Reduced a Client’s Cloud Bill by 40% on AWS"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Results at a Glance<\/h2>\n
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40%<\/div>\n
Cost Reduction<\/div>\n
AWS bill cut in 14 days<\/div>\n <\/div>\n
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$3,800<\/div>\n
Monthly Savings<\/div>\n
From $9,400 to $5,600\/mo<\/div>\n <\/div>\n
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$45,600<\/div>\n
Annual Savings<\/div>\n
Recurring year-over-year<\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

1. Client Overview<\/h4>\n\n

Our client is a US-based healthcare technology company<\/strong> operating a patient data management platform serving hospitals and outpatient clinics across three states. Their platform handles protected health information (PHI), appointment scheduling, clinical note storage, and real-time provider communications \u2014 all under strict HIPAA regulatory requirements<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n

With a growing user base and an engineering team fully committed to product development, infrastructure management had taken a back seat. The result: an AWS bill that had quietly ballooned to over $9,400 per month<\/strong> \u2014 and nobody on the team could explain exactly why.<\/p>\n\n\n

2. The Problem: $9,400\/Month and No Idea Why<\/h4>\n\n

When the client's CTO first contacted Skynats, the conversation started with a telling admission: \"We know we're overpaying. We just don't know where.\"<\/em><\/p>\n\n

This is one of the most common situations we encounter. Fast-growing teams provision infrastructure to meet immediate needs and move on. Reserved Instances expire. Test environments stay running. Databases keep their original spec even after traffic patterns shift. Over time, the bill grows \u2014 not from bad decisions, but from decisions that were never revisited.<\/p>\n\n

The compounding factor for this client was compliance. Any infrastructure change had to preserve full HIPAA compliance \u2014 encryption at rest and in transit, access controls, audit logging, and data isolation. This meant a standard cost optimisation playbook couldn't simply be applied \u2014 every change required validation against the compliance framework first.<\/p>\n\n

\n \ud83c\udfaf The Core Challenge<\/strong>\n

Reduce a $9,400\/month AWS bill by a meaningful percentage \u2014 with full HIPAA compliance maintained at every step, zero downtime, and no changes to application code.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

3. The Skynats AWS Infrastructure Audit<\/h4>\n\n

Before touching anything, our engineers spent the first three days conducting a full read-only infrastructure audit. This is a non-negotiable step \u2014 acting without a complete picture is how optimisation projects cause outages.<\/p>\n\n

Our audit covered:<\/p>\n\n