A typical production S3 bucket at 18 months old has accumulated objects across every feature that ever ran. The initial uploads from your onboarding pipeline. The exports from the analytics job that ran twice and was deprecated. The thumbnails from the old image processing service. The log archives from before you switched to CloudWatch. Run S3 Inventory on a bucket that has been active for a year and the pattern is always the same: 70-80% of objects have a last-accessed date older than 90 days. Most of them have never been read after the day they were written. Every one of those objects is sitting in S3 Standard at $0.023 per GB per month. That is the default. AWS does not move them for you. At 50TB of storage, the gap between Standard pricing and what you should be paying for cold data is roughly $800 per month — $9,600 per year — for a single bucket. Teams with hundreds of buckets multiply that number accordingly.…