How to Find Unused AWS Resources That Are Silently Billing You
I found money disappearing from an account I hadn't touched in months.
I had an AWS account I hadn't touched in about four months. I kept seeing charges. Nothing huge. Maybe $15–20 a month. But I had nothing running. Or so I thought.
I connected Liberra and asked: "what's wasting my money right now?" Two EBS volumes and a tiny EC2 instance. Found in seconds. Deleted them. Bill stopped.
The frustrating part wasn't the money. It was that I couldn't find them manually. I'd opened EC2. Saw no running instances. I was in the wrong region. Didn't know to check Volumes separately. Looked completely clean from my side.
Where unused resources hide
EBS volumes. When you terminate an EC2 instance, the root volume doesn't always get deleted. It stays as an "available" volume, detached, billing you ~$0.08/GB per month indefinitely.
Elastic IPs. Unattached IPs cost $0.005/hour each. About $3.60/month per IP. Small. Easy to forget you have five of them.
Load balancers with no targets. A load balancer with no healthy instances behind it still costs ~$16–18/month. Common after you shut down a service but forget the load balancer.
RDS snapshots. Manual snapshots don't expire. If you made one during a migration a year ago, it's still there. Still billing you for storage.
Stopped RDS instances. AWS lets you stop an RDS database temporarily. After 7 days it automatically starts again. You're billed full instance price regardless of whether it's running.
The region problem
This is the part that gets everyone. AWS has 30+ regions. The console only shows you the region you're currently in. If you created resources in us-west-2 and you're looking at us-east-1, it looks empty. Clean. Nothing running.
The resources are still there. Still billing. Just in a region you forgot to check.
How to find all of it without clicking through 30 regions
Connect Liberra. It scans every region, every service, automatically. Before you even ask. Then just ask.
"What's unused in my account?" It surfaces the unattached volumes, the idle IPs, the load balancers with no targets, the forgotten snapshots. All regions. All at once.
"What's costing me money that I'm not actually using?" Same thing. Broken down by resource, by cost, so you know what to delete first.
You're not clicking through 8 consoles and switching regions. You're just asking. That's it.
— Founder, LiberraAI