Why Is My AWS Bill So High? How to Actually Find Out
I let a second AWS account run for six months before I checked what was inside it. Here's what I found, and how you can check yours in a few minutes.
I had a second AWS account. I'd set it up originally to host Liberra, then ended up hosting it somewhere else, so the account just sat there. The bill kept showing up every month. I knew it existed, and I never asked why. I let that go for six months before I finally opened the account and looked.
Inside were two EBS volumes, one EC2 instance, and a few Elastic IPs. None of them were doing anything. They'd been sitting there, billing me, since the day I stopped using that account. I deleted them myself, in the console, right then.
Why this happens to everyone
This wasn't the first time either. Back when I was learning AWS, I forgot to set up billing alerts and left a server running for a few days. The bill went up. It only reached about ten dollars because I caught it early, but it's the classic mistake almost everyone makes at some point. I made it too.
Cloud resources don't ask permission to keep running. You spin something up for a test, forget to turn it off, and it sits there charging you until you happen to look. Flexera's State of the Cloud report, released in March 2026, found that organizations waste an estimated 29% of their cloud spend. People aren't careless. Nothing tells you when something is quietly running for no reason, so it just keeps going.
The usual suspects
Idle EC2 instances are the most common one. A server you launched for a test, a demo, a project that got shelved... it keeps running at full price whether anyone's using it or not.
Unattached EBS volumes are next. These are the storage drives AWS creates alongside your servers. Delete the server but not the drive, or detach it and forget about it, and it keeps existing and keeps billing you while doing nothing.
Unused Elastic IPs are the quiet one. An Elastic IP is a fixed public address AWS reserves for you. It's easy to claim one, stop using it, and keep paying for it as if it still mattered.
How to actually find yours
You can do this manually. Open the EC2 console and check which instances have had low CPU usage over the past few weeks. Open the EBS volumes page and filter for the ones marked "available," meaning not attached to anything. Open the Elastic IPs page and look for the ones marked as not associated. It works, but it takes real time, and most people don't get to it until the bill forces the question.
Or you can ask. Liberra already has your account indexed once you connect it, so you're not starting from a blank page. You can ask it in plain English: "what's costing me money for no reason?" or "what's just sitting there unused?" Reads are instant and don't need approval. It'll tell you what it found and what it's costing you.
Liberra will not delete anything for you. It finds what's wasting money and explains it in plain language. The deleting is on you, in the console, on purpose. Deletes are physically blocked in the code. The AI cannot delete anything, no matter what you ask it. I found six months of waste in an account I'd stopped questioning. It's better to actually know what's running in your account than to just accept the bill as a fact of life.
Founder, Liberra AI