This is the single most common finding in every cloud bill I audit. Dev and staging RDS instances running 24/7 at production size. A db.r5.xlarge costs $876/month running continuously. If your team uses it 8 hours a day on weekdays, you're paying for 720 hours and using 170. That's a 76% waste rate on a single instance. The fix takes 20 minutes and touches nothing in production. The problem in numbers db.r5.xlarge on-demand: $876/month (720 hrs) db.r5.xlarge scheduled: $306/month (252 hrs — weekdays 8am-7pm) Monthly saving: $570/month Annual saving: $6,840/year Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Multiply that by 2-3 dev/staging environments and you're looking at $15,000–$20,000/year on instances that sleep most of the time.…