---
name: aws-cost-audit
description: Run a first-pass cost audit on an AWS account before the bill gets out of hand. Covers billing alerts, unused resources, right sizing and pricing strategy.
---

# AWS Cost Audit

I do not want my AWS bill to bankrupt me. Please review my AWS account end-to-end
and address the following, explaining each change as you make it:

## Billing & alerts
- Set up billing alerts
- Add a monthly budget cap
- Check my Free Tier usage and flag anything about to exceed it

## Unused resources
- Find unused resources across every region
- Identify orphaned EBS volumes and confirm with me before deleting them
- Check for idle EC2 instances

## Compute & scaling
- Right size my instances based on actual usage, not peak capacity
- Enable upper limits on every Auto Scaling group
- Add a CDN (CloudFront) to cut bandwidth costs where it makes sense

## Storage & database
- Check my S3 storage lifecycle rules and move cold data to cheaper tiers
- Review my database instance tier against actual load

## Network & traffic
- Find unattached Elastic IP addresses
- Review my CloudWatch Logs retention settings
- Cache expensive, repeated queries
- Check my data egress traffic and where it's coming from

## Pricing strategy
- Compare Reserved Instances and Savings Plans against my current On-Demand spend
- Check for regional pricing differences on resources I could safely move
- Flag any other risk or waste you notice, even if it wasn't listed above

Go resource by resource, explain what you changed and why, and flag anything you're
not fully confident fixing automatically so I can review it manually.

Most important: make no mistakes.

---
Source: stanc.dev/resources/aws-cost-audit-prompt