Tech startups are leveraging the capability of the cloud to scale their businesses and doing so as cost-effective as possible is vital for success, especially in the current challenging economic climate.

The best way to increase the chances of success of your startup during a market downturn is to be as cost-effective as you can in other words to run it as cheaply as possible.

AWS is committed to making its infrastructure cheaper, more efficient and more flexible. This is good news for startups and businesses across the world which are facing a very challenging outlook with a looming recession, high inflation, and rising cost of living and energy prices that are expected to last for the foreseeable future.

In addition to that, there’s a downturn in venture capital with a more challenging fundraising climate – venture funding for startups suffered a 50% year-over-year drop in the third quarter of 2022. This challenging economic environment is pushing more businesses, especially tech startups to pivot from growth at all costs to a focus on profitability and cash preservation.

One of the biggest recurring expenses for tech businesses is their cloud bill. True that in the long term a well-optimised cloud infrastructure will save you money but work needs to be done in order to achieve that.

So if you’re wondering about how you can save money on your AWS bill, cut costs and extend your runway, this post is for you.

Use AWS Serverless Services: When you use serverless services such as AWS Lambda you pay per request which means they’re usually cheaper than provisioned services.

Use AWS Budget Alert: AWS Budget Alert send you notifications if your bill is going to be higher than what you expect it to be. This will alert your team and immediate action can end up saving you thousands of dollars. 

Use AWS Reserved Instances: Using reserved instances can easily save you between 15% – 50%.

Use an instance scheduler: You get billed for when your instances are running even when they’re not being used so you can use an instance scheduler to turn them on and off and save money.

For example, let’s say that you only need the instances between 8am-10pm, you can schedule instances just for this period.

Rightsize instances: The bigger your AWS instances the more you’ll pay for them.

Have some of your compute and database instances been over-provisioned and can you reduce their size and still run your applications?

Probably yes.

Keep in mind that reducing the size of your instances might affect the capacity of your servers so before doing that you may have to implement autoscaling policies so that your infrastructure can handle traffic spikes.

Let us know if you want us to implement these cost-saving guidelines for you!