eventually tried to reduce cloud costs on my project and found so much waste

I've been running a side project on aws for like 8 months and the bill has been sitting around $187 to $203 per month which I kept telling myself was fine because I had other stuff to worry about, but I finally actually looked at the breakdown last week and holy shit I'm an idiot.

Turns out I've been running a dev environment 24/7 that I use maybe twice a month, paying for an rds instance that's way oversized because i set it up thinking i'd have way more traffic than i actually do, and i have s3 buckets full of old logs from 6 months ago just racking up storage costs for no reason.

spent a few hours downsizing the rds and setting up a stop schedule for the dev stuff and deleting old logs, got the bill down to around $118 last month. still probably leaving money on the table somewhere but at least it's not as bad as it was.

kind of embarrassing how long i let this go but whatever, fixed now. probably should set up alerts or something so i don't let it drift again but knowing me i probably won't actually do that until the bill spikes.