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When RDS Proxy Eats 70% of Your Total CloudWatch Ingestion Cost

Pulling up a client’s Cost Explorer, I found RDS Proxy responsible for 70% of their total CloudWatch Logs ingestion cost — while their actual “RDS Proxy” line item looked completely normal. The line item said normal. The bill said otherwise. My first reaction, and the first reaction of nearly every client I’ve shown this number to, is always the same: “I’m already paying for RDS Proxy by the vCPU-hour — why is it also eating into my CloudWatch bill? Aren’t those two completely separate things?”

  • AWS
  • RDS
  • RDS Proxy
  • CloudWatch
  • Cost Optimization
  • FinOps
Sunday, August 2, 2026 Read
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Cutting a Client's CloudFront Bill by ~91% with AWS's New Flat-Rate Plans

A client came to us in shock over their CloudFront bill — $2,300/month during their peak sales period. Here’s how we got it down to $200/month. AWS built an entire new pricing plan just to admit the old one was robbery. A client reached out to us after opening their AWS invoice during their busiest sales month of the year and seeing CloudFront alone hit ~$2,300/month, with the vast majority of that coming from data transfer out to their customers. They weren’t looking for a full re-architecture — they just wanted to know: is this normal, and can anything be done about it?

  • AWS
  • CloudFront
  • Cost Optimization
  • FinOps
  • CDN
Monday, March 2, 2026 Read
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