Topic
Storage
Storage is the quietest line on an AWS bill: it grows every month whether or not anyone is watching.
AWS gives you more storage options than any other provider, and each one is priced for a different job. S3 alone has eight storage classes; EBS has five volume types; snapshots, versions, and replicas all accumulate on their own schedules. The pricing is fair for the job each tier does. The waste comes from data sitting in a tier built for a different job.
The patterns repeat across almost every account we scan: gp2 volumes that were never migrated to gp3, buckets with no lifecycle policy, snapshots orphaned by deleted instances, and versioned buckets quietly retaining every draft ever written. None of these show up as a single large line item, which is exactly why they persist.
The guides, comparisons, and definitions on this page cover how AWS storage pricing actually works, class by class, and where the recoverable money usually hides.
Related topics
Compute
EC2, Lambda, and Fargate. Instance families, rightsizing, and the price of idle capacity.
Data transfer
The egress and inter-zone charges that hide in the bill. NAT, CloudFront, and VPC endpoint economics.
Billing fundamentals
How the AWS bill is built. The CUR, rate types, cost allocation tags, and reading an invoice.