How to cut your cloud bill without leaving the cloud

DigitalZeg Insights · 16 October 2026

Cloud bills tend to creep upwards quietly. A few disciplined habits usually recover a meaningful share of the spend without changing provider.

1. See where the money goes

Tag resources by project, environment and owner, then review spend by service. You can’t reduce costs you can’t attribute.

2. Switch off what isn’t used

Development and test environments often run around the clock. Schedule them to shut down outside working hours, and remove unattached disks, old snapshots and forgotten servers.

3. Right-size

Many servers and databases are larger than their workload needs. Check real usage over a few weeks and move to smaller sizes where the numbers support it.

4. Commit where usage is steady

For workloads that run constantly, reserved capacity or savings plans cost less than on-demand pricing. Use them only for usage you’re confident will continue.

5. Set storage rules

Move older files and backups to cheaper storage tiers automatically, and set retention periods so data isn’t kept forever by default.

6. Watch data transfer

Moving data out of the cloud or between regions can be a hidden cost. Keep related services in the same region and cache where possible.

7. Set budgets and review monthly

Budgets and alerts catch surprises early, and a short monthly review keeps costs in check as systems change. For an extreme example, 37signals reported cutting its yearly cloud spend from $3.2m to $1.3m by moving to its own hardware. See our case studies. For most businesses, the steps above are the place to start.