Where your S3 bill leaks. The five places Amazon S3 bills carry storage nobody uses, and a 30-day plan to fix them.

52%lower monthly bill in the 50 TB model

S3 bills usually carry storage the business never uses, and it sits in five predictable places. In the worked example in this paper, a 50 TB account drops from $1,369 to $660 a month (52 percent) with three configuration changes and no change to the applications that read the data.

S3 waste grows quietly because nothing breaks. Old file versions, abandoned uploads and data nobody has opened in a year cost the same as live data, and the console shows a bucket’s size but not what that size is made of.

1. Data that is never read, still in S3 Standard
2. Old versions kept forever on versioned buckets
3. Multipart uploads that never finished
4. Logs and trails written to Standard and never expired
5. Data transfer out paid at list price instead of through CloudFront