While AWS offers significant benefits compared to traditional on-premise infrastructure, its inherent elasticity and scalability tend to create uncontrolled costs.
AWS costs can be opaque and difficult to analyze, and without a system for identifying and managing the source of costs, they can quickly undermine profit margins.
However, several tools have emerged to help organizations manage and optimize their costs over the past few years. In this guide, we’ll look at some of the top AWS cost optimization tools and third-party solutions offered by AWS.
We’ll also cover what AWS cost optimization includes, the best practices you can use to reduce or optimize costs, and the concept of cloud cost intelligence. This concept goes beyond traditional AWS cost management to help you connect costs to business metrics — all while empowering your engineering team with cost autonomy.
What Is Cost Optimization In AWS?
AWS cost optimization involves implementing cost-saving best practices to get the most out of your AWS cloud investment.
Traditionally, legacy cost tools see cost optimization as a process of simply reducing cloud costs, typically through several optimization techniques such as:
- Identifying mismanaged resources
- Eliminating waste
- Reserving capacity for higher discounts
- And right-sizing computing services for scale
However, reducing your AWS bill is only part of AWS cost optimization.
Optimizing costs should be a continuous process that looks at ways to reduce your AWS spend, align that spend with the business outcomes you care about, and optimize your environment to meet your business goals.
For example, most SaaS organizations care about their COGS and unit cost (like cost per customer or feature). When organizations can see how cloud spend aligns with these metrics, teams can make cost-informed decisions that improve these areas. Engineering can make software architecture decisions that help improve profitability. Finance can use this insight to price the company’s products better and improve gross margins.
This helps engineering and finance better align on AWS spend to make informed decisions that improve profitability — rather than throttle resources to cut costs.
Native AWS Cost Tools Vs. Third-Party Tools
Native AWS tools are built into the AWS ecosystem. They’re free, easy to access, and integrate well with other AWS services. But they only work with AWS and often lack the advanced features needed for complex environments.
Third-party tools provide deeper insights, automation, and multi-cloud support (AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud). They’re more customizable and scalable, making them a better fit for large or growing organizations. However, they come with added costs and may take extra effort to integrate with your setup.
Why Should You Optimize Your AWS Costs?
Cloud costs are OPEX, not CAPEX — meaning they’re ongoing and can get out of hand fast if left unmanaged. Auto-scaling helps meet demand but can also skyrocket costs during events like a DDOS spike.
That’s why cost optimization tools matter. They can:
- Show you where your AWS costs are coming from — fast
- Help you track usage across teams, products, and customers
- Alert you to anomalies before they become expensive
- Support better finance and engineering collaboration
- Help eliminate unused resources and right-size instances
- Catch untagged EBS volumes or soon-to-expire RIs
- Show your team how each workload affects the business
Using a tool is only part of it. You still need to apply AWS best practices and design principles from day one — whether you’re building cloud-native or migrating from on-prem.
What Are Some AWS Design Principles That Enable Cost Optimization?
AWS insists that you must be cost-conscious and details five principles for optimizing your costs.
1. Leverage Cloud Financial Management (CFM)
Operating in the cloud requires a cost-aware approach. It also involves hiring the right people to create cost-effective cloud-native solutions.
An effective way to implement CFM is to include engineers in cloud cost ownership rather than just the finance team. Engineers who are empowered to make continuous cost-conscious development decisions can resolve the problem of thinning margins at the technical level.
2. Pay-as-you-go
You can increase or decrease your compute resources with AWS based on demand.
For example, if your app sees high traffic earlier in the day and little traffic the rest of the day, you can save money by reducing resources during the “off-peak hours.” Remember, EC2 instances are billed by the hour, whether or not you use them.
3. Embrace managed services
The public cloud can replace the need to build infrastructure from scratch and spend money on necessary hardware, engineering talent, maintenance, and other management responsibilities of a physical data center. It would free your engineers to improve your app’s code rather than its infrastructure.
4. Track, analyze, and attribute expenditure right
The cloud enables you to monitor workload usage. We suggest further tracking your cloud costs by workload, user, and revenue streams. Doing so allows you to measure your return on investment (ROI) more easily.
By knowing how much you spend on each customer and how much each deployment and testing project costs, you can then find ways to minimize costs without sacrificing the performance of your cloud solution, which could adversely affect actual business outcomes.
5. Track efficiency
Cost optimization should be measurable, and the results should relate to actual business outcomes. To do so, you need to measure the ‘standard’ costs of outputting particular workloads. Monitoring the cloud inputs and outputs over time will enable you to achieve this.
Then, compare the findings with future measurements to determine when costs go up, down, or remain the same. After identifying what actions led to the change, you may use that information to optimize other workloads.
Those AWS design pillars for cost optimization provide a baseline for optimizing your costs. Next, you should implement AWS cost optimization practices.
What Are Some AWS Cost Optimization Best Practices For Success?
You can incorporate the following practices into your cost optimization strategy to reduce your AWS spend.
- Right-size your provisions to match your needs.
- Automate cloud cost management and optimization. Try native AWS tools before deploying more advanced tools from a third party.
- Schedule on and off times unless workloads need to run all the time.
- When creating or launching an EC2 instance, check the “delete on termination” box. When you terminate the attached instance, the unattached EBS volumes will be automatically removed.
- Decide which workloads to use with Reserved Instances and which ones to use with On-Demand Pricing.
- Keep your most recent snapshot for a few weeks, then delete it as you take even more recent snapshots that can restore your data in a disaster.
- Avoid remapping an Elastic IP address more than 100 times a month. No charges will apply if you do.
- If you cannot, use an optimization tool to find and release unattached IP addresses after terminating the instances to which they are attached.
- Upgrade to the latest AWS instance generation to improve performance at the same or a lower cost.
- Use optimization tools to find and terminate unused Elastic Load Balancers and failed launch instances.
- Transfer data you infrequently use to a lower-cost tier.
- Optimize your cloud costs as a continuous part of your DevOps culture.
Additional benefits that come with AWS cost optimization tools include:
- Budget Control: You can set budgets and alerts to avoid unexpected costs. These tools notify you when spending approaches or exceeds predefined limits.
- Forecasting. Tools offer predictive analysis to forecast future spending based on historical data, helping with planning and budgeting.
- Continuous monitoring. These tools continuously monitor your AWS environment for cost-saving opportunities. They allow for proactive management.
- Improved Governance. These tools help maintain control over cloud spending across the organization by enforcing cost policies and best practices.
Now let’s look at the tools you can use to optimize your AWS bill and when to use them.
The 25 Best AWS Cost Optimization Tools By Category
AWS cost optimization tools fall into several categories. Below, we’ve broken them down by category and listed reasons you might use or might not use these tools, depending on your situation and needs.
Cloud Cost Intelligence Solutions
Instead of only showing total cloud costs, such as monthly EC2 spend, cloud cost intelligence enables engineering teams to see the cost of the features they’re working on with relevant context. With this cost insight, they can treat cost like any other performance metric, influencing their decisions, from development to detecting and debugging an issue in production.
Engineers can understand how their technical decisions and actions impact real business outcomes on a per-unit basis, such as the cost per customer, team, or feature.
1. CloudZero
CloudZero is an excellent example of a cloud cost intelligence solution. It offers dev teams specific views, easily explorable context, and automatic cost anomaly alerts — all without extensive manual tagging.
Companies can use CloudZero to understand their costs through unit cost analysis, Kubernetes cost monitoring, Snowflake cost intelligence, cost per feature, per customer, and more.
Engineers can drill into cost data from a high-level down to the individual components that drive their cloud spend — and see exactly what AWS services cost them the most and why. Finance will love it too, as engineering can better report on AWS costs, and finance members can uncover vital business metrics like COGS, unit cost, and cost per customer.
With cloud cost intelligence, engineering can make informed development and architecture decisions that help improve profitability, and finance can make business decisions such as improving pricing for different target segments.
Schedule a demo today to see how CloudZero works.
AWS Native Tools
Free, native AWS tools may be a good starting point for small companies with a relatively straightforward cloud bill.
Here are several examples:
2. AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer helps you visualize costs and usage trends across your AWS accounts. You can filter by service, linked account, tag, or time range to pinpoint spending areas. It also lets you forecast future costs and analyze historical data, making it ideal for planning and budgeting cloud spend.
Related read: AWS Cost Explorer Vs. Cost And Usage Report
3. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection uses machine learning to flag unexpected spikes in spending automatically. It sends alerts when anomalies are detected, allowing teams to investigate and take action. You can set up monitors based on services, linked accounts, or tags to track the right segments of your cloud usage.
4. AWS Trusted Advisor
AWS Trusted Advisor gives real-time recommendations to help you optimize your AWS setup. It covers cost optimization, security, performance, fault tolerance, and service limits. The tool eliminates underused resources, identifies savings opportunities, and improves overall efficiency based on AWS best practices.
5. AWS Budgets
AWS Budgets lets you set a “cost ceiling” based on the types of resources, tags, and accounts. When your costs surpass your budget, you’ll receive an alert to intervene before you exceed your limit.
You can also use AWS CloudWatch, Cost and Usage Report, CloudTrail, and S3 Analytics to monitor the public cloud for instances that may affect your costs.
Native AWS cost optimization tools can help your organization start improving its cost awareness and visibility into AWS workloads. When you reach significant spending across multiple AWS accounts, however, you might need to upgrade to a more robust cost management solution.
Traditional Cloud Cost Management And Optimization Tools
Many of these tools were introduced about a decade ago when AWS offered little to help engineering and finance teams understand AWS billing. Today, the tools are widely used and can be effective for reporting on cost, helping with Reserved Instance and Savings Plan purchasing, and reducing waste.
These tools cater primarily to finance or FinOps, a centralized team or user that interfaces between engineering and finance.
6. VMware CloudHealth
VMware CloudHealth is a cloud management platform that provides visibility into cloud costs, usage, and performance across multiple cloud environments. It enables organizations to optimize cloud spending, enforce governance policies, and improve operational efficiency. With features like cost reporting, budget tracking, and policy-driven automation, CloudHealth helps businesses align cloud investments with strategic goals.
Related read: The Top 10 CloudHealth Alternatives Compared In 2025
7. Apptio Cloudability
Apptio Cloudability is a cloud financial management platform that offers real-time insights into cloud spending. It helps organizations optimize resource usage, manage budgets, and implement chargeback or showback models. Cloudability supports informed decision-making and promotes team accountability by translating complex billing data into actionable information.
8. CloudCheckr
CloudCheckr is a cloud management solution that provides comprehensive visibility into cloud infrastructure. It assists organizations in reducing costs, ensuring security compliance, and optimizing resource utilization. With features like cost allocation, security auditing, and automated best practice checks, CloudCheckr supports effective cloud governance and operational efficiency.
9. Densify
Densify is a cloud optimization platform that uses machine learning to analyze resource usage and recommend adjustments. It focuses on rightsizing cloud and container environments to enhance performance and reduce costs. Densify helps organizations maintain efficient and cost-effective cloud operations by continuously monitoring workloads and providing precise optimization recommendations.
Point Solutions For AWS RI Management
These types of DevOps tools can be beneficial if you are looking for a fully automated solution for managing Retirement Plans and Savings Plans.
10. ProsperOps
ProsperOps provides superior financial outcomes by automatically blending Savings Plans and Reserved Instances with advanced algorithms, advanced techniques, and continuous execution outcomes.
These tools are limited to this sub-segment of cost optimization, so you might need to use them in combination with other tools.
11. nOps
The nOps cloud management platform promises to help you reduce your AWS spend by up to 50% on autopilot. It does this by leveraging machine learning to identify your usage patterns and associated costs.
nOps then manages your reservations, detects and stops unused resources, and runs workloads on the most cost-effective spot instances. NOps also optimizes container clusters and can help align your setup with the AWS Well-Architected Framework. Because it is a SaaS platform, you can run it as a standalone solution or get it through the AWS Marketplace.
12. Zesty
Zesty scales your cloud resources to meet your real-time business demands. It does this by automating storage, AWS Reserved Instances, and Savings Plans management.
Zesty dynamically adapts these discount commitments to your real-time usage needs by continuously buying and selling AWS Reserved Instances. With Zesty Disk, you can automatically shrink and expand block storage volumes based on real-time usage to save up to 70% on cloud storage costs.
13. FinOut
Unlike native cost tools, Finout provides deeper insights into your cloud spend. You can see your costs per cost center, namespace, and more. In addition, you can analyze usage-based costs using customizable dashboards and reports.
You can also set up custom alerts to reach your team when certain usage or cost milestones are met. Ultimately, Finout enables you to keep track of costs across major cloud platforms, including AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Snowflake, and Databricks.
AWS Continuous Cloud Optimization Tools
This category of tools uses AI or machine learning to change infrastructure and applications automatically and continuously to reduce overall cost and improve efficiency.
These solutions are a great first step in reducing overall costs. They can create immediate savings with minimal work. Many are also priced based on savings, so they cost nothing upfront.
Here are some examples:
14. Spot.io
Spot.io automates cloud infrastructure to provide your workloads with always-on, always-scalable, and always-cost-effective infrastructure. With Spot.io, you can continuously optimize your infrastructure, maximize utilization, and leverage the lowest-cost computing resources available.
15. Opsani
Opsani continuously reconfigures and optimizes cloud workloads based on the latest in AI and Machine Learning with every new code release, load profile change, and new infrastructure upgrade.
Opsani can optimize applications across an entire service delivery platform or within a single application, autonomously managing runtime environments and tuning applications at scale.
Your workloads may also not match these solutions, mainly if they are stateful and can’t be turned on or off easily.
16. Xosphere
The Xosphere Spot instance orchestration tool works natively with Amazon Auto Scaling Groups, monitoring instances within every group.
As soon as Spot Instances become available at a reasonable price, the platform switches your workload over to more cost-effective Spot Instances instead of costly On-Demand instances. As soon as this Spot Instance capacity is no longer available at a reasonable price, Instance Orchestrator replaces it with On-Demand instances just in time to prevent downtime.
By switching from one instance type to the other as needed, Instance Orchestrator ensures high availability and low costs. A CloudZero partner, Xosphere’s continuous discounting solution is accessible through CloudZero’s discount instruments dashboard.
17. Cloudbolt
Cloudbolt is a robust hybrid cloud and multi-cloud cost management platform. Like CloudHealth or Cloudability, It is more suitable for enterprise cloud cost management on AWS.
The platform enables you to identify idle resources, autonomous resource orchestration using custom policies, and integrating multicloud cost data in a single platform for unified analysis.
With Cloudbolt, you can also get tailored recommendations on where to improve, define quotas to maintain cost compliance and build security directly into your workloads to prevent cost overruns.
18. Harness
Harness started as a cloud management platform for DevOps teams, not finance and FinOps professionals.
But with Harness Cloud Cost Management, you can collect, analyze, and report your hybrid cloud costs, including across AWS services. It also offers customizable dashboards, cost categories, and Kubernetes cost analysis.
Detect, analyze, and resolve cost anomalies as they arise to prevent costly problems. In addition, it actively manages idle cloud resources without requiring custom scripts or manual engineering.
19. Yotascale
With Yotascale, you get an enterprise-grade AWS cost management platform for FinOps teams. It offers a detailed view of AWS and multi-cloud infrastructure spending. This includes containers and Kubernetes.
Better yet, Yotascale provides decent cost allocation, automated cloud budgeting and forecasting, as well as real-time cost anomaly reports. The platform also supports advanced workload right-sizing and AWS RI and SPs management.
It then generates savings recommendations to give your teams the precise improvements they can make immediately to boost cost-efficiency and productivity.
AWS Kubernetes/Container Cost Optimization Tools
If you work mostly in Kubernetes, one of these tools may be helpful. Solutions in this category focus only on cluster activities. While some of these tools are reporting tools, others provide recommendations.
Consider these examples:
20. Amazon ECS
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service. It supports both EC2 and AWS Fargate launch types, offering flexibility in resource management.
ECS also integrates with CloudWatch for monitoring and supports cost-saving measures such as Compute Savings Plans and AWS Compute Optimizer recommendations to optimize CPU and memory configurations.
21. Amazon EKS
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed Kubernetes service that facilitates running Kubernetes applications on AWS or on-premises. EKS supports integration with tools like Karpenter for intelligent auto-scaling and cost optimization. By leveraging EC2 Spot Instances, Savings Plans, and Graviton-based instances, EKS enables efficient resource utilization and cost savings.
Debating between EKS and ECS? Check out our ultimate comparison guide here.
22. IBM Kubecost
Now part of IBM, Kubecost breaks down costs by namespace, deployment, and service, helping in identifying over-provisioned resources and idle workloads. It also integrates with AWS Cost and Usage Reports, enabling accurate cost attribution and facilitating budget management and alerts.
23. GitLab
GitLab is a DevOps platform that offers source code management, CI/CD, and security features. While not exclusively a cost optimization tool, GitLab’s integration with Kubernetes allows for streamlined deployment and management of containerized applications. By automating workflows and providing visibility into the development lifecycle, GitLab can contribute to operational efficiency and potential cost savings.
24. Splunk
By integrating with Amazon EKS, Splunk enables real-time visibility into cluster performance, resource utilization, and application metrics. This granular insight allows teams to identify underutilized resources, detect anomalies, and make informed decisions to right-size workloads.
Additionally, Splunk’s analytics can highlight inefficiencies in deployment configurations and scaling policies, facilitating proactive cost management in Kubernetes environments on AWS.
Here are some of the most practical Spunk cost optimization tips.
25. Spot Ocean
Now part of Flexera, Spot Ocean is a serverless infrastructure engine for containers.
Software development teams release their products using managed databases and a variety of services. Since these tools don’t cover all cloud costs, they are less effective than a more comprehensive solution.
CloudZero Can Be The Comprehensive AWS Cost Optimization Solution You Need
AWS cost optimization isn’t just about reducing spend. It’s about engineering enablement and architectural efficiency.
CloudZero gives engineering teams the cost intelligence they need to make cost-informed decisions, align cloud spend to business metrics, and detect anomalies before they escalate.
to see how CloudZero works.
The Cloud Cost Playbook
The step-by-step guide to cost maturity
