AWS cost went up this month?

If your AWS cost went up this month, it usually means one or more services used more compute, storage, traffic, logs, or background resources than last month.

The increase often comes from services like RDS, NAT Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, or S3.

Check your AWS bill

Common reasons AWS costs go up this month

EC2 or background compute ran longer than expected.
CloudWatch logs increased due to higher traffic or debugging.
S3 storage or downloads increased.
RDS database size or backups grew.
NAT Gateway processed more traffic.
DynamoDB read/write requests increased.

If the increase feels sudden, check why your AWS bill increased overnight or why your AWS cost is higher than expected.

Simple rule:

Compare this month vs last month and find the service with the biggest increase first.

Example

Last month: £58

This month: £124

RDS increased by £22
NAT Gateway increased by £18
CloudWatch logs increased by £14

Result: Multiple small increases → big total increase

Recommendations

Check RDS first because it had the biggest increase.
Review database size, backups, snapshots, and instance class.
Check NAT Gateway traffic to see which resources are sending data through it.
Set CloudWatch log retention so logs do not keep growing every month.
Focus on the largest cost changes first instead of trying to optimise every service at once.

What to check first

How to reduce costs

Stop unused compute
Delete unused storage
Set log retention
Reduce unnecessary traffic

Find what changed

FAQ

Why did my AWS cost go up this month?

Because one or more services used more resources than last month.

What is the fastest way to find the cause?

Compare month-to-date vs last month and look for the biggest change.