Originally published on TechSaaS Cloud Originally published on TechSaaS Cloud We Audited 12 Startups' AWS Bills — Average Waste: 43% Last quarter, we ran infrastructure cost audits for 12 startups (seed to Series B). The results were consistent and painful: every single one was wasting between 28% and 67% of their AWS spend. Not because they were stupid. Because AWS makes it trivially easy to provision resources and quietly expensive to maintain them. Here's exactly what we found and how to fix it in 45 minutes. The 5 Biggest Cost Leaks (In Order of Impact) 1. NAT Gateway Charges: The Silent $540/Month Tax Every startup we audited was running 3 NAT Gateways (one per AZ) at $180/month each — $540/month for outbound internet traffic routing. The reality: A 4-person engineering team with a single-service backend does not need multi-AZ redundancy for NAT. Your app server can tolerate a single NAT Gateway. If it goes down, requests retry. The fix: Reduce to 1 NAT Gateway in your primary AZ.…