How to Audit Your AWS Costs (Without a FinOps Team)
Your bill went up. Here's how to find what's causing it. Fast.
Your AWS bill went up. You open Cost Explorer. There's a graph going up. That's pretty much all it tells you.
Cost Explorer shows totals. It doesn't point to the specific resource that's the problem. Doesn't flag the thing that's running that shouldn't be. You have to find it yourself. EC2, RDS, S3, load balancers, snapshots, 30+ regions.
Most cost problems aren't complicated. They're just forgotten things. An EBS volume left behind when an instance was terminated. A load balancer with no targets. A dev database running Multi-AZ. None of it expensive alone. Together it's $50–200 disappearing quietly every month.
The manual way
If you want to dig through it yourself: Cost Explorer → Group by Service → find what grew → drill into Usage Type → switch to each service console → filter for orphaned or idle resources → repeat across every region you've ever used.
EC2 > Volumes filtered by "available" state catches unattached EBS volumes. EC2 > Elastic IPs shows you IPs you're paying for but not using ($0.005/hour each). RDS > Snapshots shows manual snapshots that never got cleaned up. And so on.
It works. Takes about an hour if you're systematic. The problem is you have to remember to do it, and you have to check every region. AWS doesn't show you a combined view across regions. You'll miss things.
The faster way
Connect Liberra to your AWS account. It scans everything before you even ask. Every region, every service. Then just ask.
"What's costing me the most right now?" It breaks it down by service and by resource. Not just EC2, but which specific instances, which volumes, which snapshots.
"What looks unused or idle?" It finds EBS volumes not attached to anything, load balancers with no healthy targets, Elastic IPs sitting unassociated, RDS instances that were stopped and auto-restarted.
"Did my costs go up this month?" It tells you what changed and what caused it.
Same audit. No clicking through consoles. No switching regions manually. Just ask.
— Founder, LiberraAI