Educational guide · Not an audit or consulting

AWS Cost Review Checklist for SMB Teams

A practical self-service checklist to review AWS monthly spend—idle resources, storage classes, and tagging. Educational reference only; not an audit.

Who this is for

Finance ops, IT owners, and founders who pay AWS bills monthly and need a repeatable self-review—not a third-party audit.

Before you start

• Export Cost Explorer monthly costs by service for the last 3 months.
• Official reference: AWS Pricing and Cost Explorer docs.
• Assign an owner per top-5 service line—facts only, no projected savings in external comms.

Checklist

• Identify top 5 services by spend and document month-over-month trend.
• List EC2 instances with sustained low CPU (e.g. under 10% weekly average).
• Find unattached EBS volumes; record age and size.
• Review old snapshots and lifecycle policies.
• Match S3 storage class to access pattern (Standard vs IA vs Glacier).
• Check cross-AZ and cross-region data transfer lines.
• Confirm non-production schedules (stop/start or automation).
• Review Savings Plans / Reserved Instance coverage vs on-demand usage.
• Review NAT Gateway and idle load balancer charges.
• Review CloudWatch log retention and storage costs.
• List unused Elastic IPs.
• Verify tagging for cost allocation (cost center / project).

Next step

Enter your self-reported AWS monthly spend in the SAARS reference estimator to see a reference band (not a guarantee). For a full multi-vendor playbook, see the Pro workbook bundle.

For informational purposes only. Not legal, tax, or financial advice. Verify all figures against your contracts and vendor consoles.

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