The 5 AWS charges silently draining your budget (and how to fix each one) I've reviewed a lot of cloud bills over 7 years as a DevOps engineer. The waste isn't exotic. It's not misconfigured Kubernetes clusters or obscure data transfer fees nobody knew existed. It's the same five things, over and over, on teams that genuinely believe they're managing costs well. Here's what they are — and exactly how to fix each one. 1. Dev and staging RDS running 24/7 Your production database needs to run continuously. Your dev database does not. A db.r5.xlarge runs ~$876/month. If your team uses it 8 hours a day on weekdays, you're paying for 720 hours and using roughly 170. That's $626/month funding nothing. The fix is a Lambda schedule. Takes 20 minutes to set up, runs forever: # Stop dev RDS at 7pm every weekday aws events put-rule \ --name "StopDevRDS" \ --schedule-expression "cron(0 17 ? * MON-FRI *)" \ --state ENABLED # Start it at 8am aws events put-rule \ --name "StartDevRDS" \ --schedule-expression "cron(0 8 ?…