AWS Cost Optimization Tools To Know In 2024

Let’s uncover which AWS cost optimization tools are best for optimizing AWS budgets.

As cloud infrastructures grow increasingly complex, efficient cloud cost management has transitioned from being a mere best practice to becoming a critical mandate. The recent 2024 State of FinOps report reveals that reducing waste and managing commitments have emerged as top priorities against a backdrop of economic uncertainty. Given that a significant portion of cloud budgets goes to unused or underutilized resources, the urgency to optimize is clear.  

AWS cost optimization is not just about reducing costs but ensuring that every dollar spent contributes directly to business value. In this context, AWS cost optimization tools are more crucial than ever. By offering cloud visibility from a granular perspective and real-time recommendations to optimize, these tools empower businesses to strategically reallocate resources. They enable precise control over cloud resources, and align expenses with actual usage and strategic objectives, thus, ensuring both financial and operational efficiency.

This blog mentions the best AWS cost optimization tools, providing a comprehensive overview of their capabilities and the use cases they offer. Read on to know the details!

Dive into our interactive demo of the ZeroWaste reporting tool. CloudForecast’s AWS cost optimization feature finds and discovers possible idle resources within EC2, RDS, EBS Volume, S3, ALB/ELB, and other areas that might be wasting you money. 

Why Is AWS Cloud Cost Management Essential? 

AWS cost management is crucial for maximizing operational efficiency and ensuring your cloud spend delivers real business value. Here’s a focused look at why it’s essential:

• Complex Pricing Models: AWS offers a wide range of services, each with its own pricing structure. This diversity, while providing flexibility, introduces complexity in predicting costs and selecting the most cost-effective options. Users must be aware of various pricing tiers, discounts, and special offers, making it difficult to forecast cloud costs accurately. 

• Resource Over-Provisioning: A common challenge is over-provisioning resources to ensure performance and availability. This precaution often leads to paying for capacity that remains unused, as accurately matching resources to demand requires ongoing monitoring and adjustment. Thus, necessitating cloud cost management tools for better visibility. 

• Inefficient Resource Utilization: A significant issue in cloud computing is paying for resources that you don’t fully utilize. By identifying and shutting down idle or underused resources, you can significantly reduce your cloud expenses without impacting performance, which can be achieved through efficient AWS cost management. 

• Lack of Financial Control and Visibility: With AWS’s pay-as-you-go model, managing and tracking cloud spending becomes a complex task, underscoring the need for AWS cost management for enhanced financial visibility. It can help with granular visibility into the whats and whys of costs, enabling businesses to understand where money is being spent and identify areas for improvement. 

• Sustainable Growth: Efficient cost management supports sustainable growth by ensuring resources are used optimally. Companies can scale their operations more effectively, ensuring that scaling up does not lead to disproportionately high increases in cloud costs. This balance between growth and cost-efficiency is vital for maintaining profitability as the business expands.

• Operational Efficiency: AWS cost optimization tools offer recommendations for rightsizing and performance improvements, leading to more efficient use of cloud resources. This not only reduces costs but also improves application performance and user satisfaction, contributing to the overall success of the business.

Why Should You Use AWS Cost Optimization Tools To Control Costs?

AWS cost optimization tools are essential for offering clear insights and actionable strategies. This ensures your cloud investment is both efficient and aligned with your financial goals. Here’s how they can benefit you:

• Enhanced Monitoring and Control: These tools provide comprehensive visibility into your cloud spend, enabling you to monitor, measure, and manage your AWS resources efficiently. For instance, by tracking the usage patterns of Amazon S3, you can uncover redundant or unutilized data storage, allowing for immediate corrective action such as data deletion or tier adjustments to reduce costs without impacting performance.

• Improved Forecasting and Budgeting: With AWS cost optimization tools, organizations gain the ability to forecast future cloud spend with greater accuracy. For example, by analyzing your compute usage patterns, you can determine whether Reserved Instances or Savings Plans best match your long-term needs. This analysis ensures you commit to a discount plan that aligns with your usage forecast, optimizing your budget and maximizing savings.

• Identification of Optimization Opportunities: These tools help you with real-time recommendations within your infrastructure for cost-saving opportunities. Take, for example, an application running on EC2 instances 24/7 without significant load outside business hours. By analyzing usage data, cost optimization tools will recommend a shift to an auto-scaling group that dynamically adjusts capacity, ensuring you only pay for what you need.

• Ongoing Cost Optimization: The dynamic nature of cloud services demands continuous evaluation and optimization of costs. AWS cost optimization tools automate this process, allowing for regular adjustments that keep your cloud spend in check.

• Integration with Communication Platforms: Cloud cost management tools facilitate the seamless sharing of cost insights with your team via popular communication tools. For instance, CloudForecast’s cost optimization platform offers real-time communication via slack integration, enhancing team collaboration and swift decision-making. For more details, refer to our article on AWS cost reports via Slack.

A cloud cost report sample shared to a slack channel via CloudForecast’s cost management platform

6 AWS Cost Optimization Strategy Tips You Need To Know!

Here’s how you can maximize your AWS efficiency and savings with these six key optimization strategy tips:

1. Enhance Cost Visibility with ECS Tagging: 

Implementing detailed tagging for AWS ECS resources allows for precise tracking of costs associated with different projects, departments, or environments. By tagging ECS tasks, services, and containers, you can allocate costs accurately and identify opportunities for optimization. It also facilitates accurate visualization via graphs, which can be filtered/customized as per the cost allocation tags. You can explore more tips in our AWS ECS Pricing and Container Optimization Guide.

2. Capitalize on RDS Reserved Instances

Amazon RDS Reserved Instances can help you cut costs by up to 60% of on-demand prices in exchange depending on a commitment of 1 or 3+ years. They also offer the flexibility to change instance sizes within the same family, except for SQL Server and License Included Oracle. This option is ideal for those with a well-understood performance baseline or for the stable workloads, offering a cost-effective alternative without the need to frequently pause or resize databases. Our AWS RDS Pricing and Optimization guide can help you with more such tips here.

3. Automate Savings with S3 Lifecycle Policies: 

Setting up lifecycle policies on your S3 buckets can significantly reduce costs by automating the transition of data to cheaper storage classes or archiving rarely accessed data. For instance, you can configure policies to move older files to Amazon S3 Glacier for long-term storage, which is considerably less expensive than standard storage options. This approach not only saves money but also keeps your data organized and accessible according to your access patterns. To dive deeper into how to set up and benefit from these policies, visit our comprehensive AWS S3 Pricing and Optimization Guide.

AWS S3 console depicting “Create lifecycle rule” under “Management” of your buckets

4. Reduce Data Transfer Costs with CloudFront (CDN)

Deploying Amazon CloudFront for content delivery can significantly cut data transfer costs. By caching content closer to your users at edge locations, CloudFront minimizes the amount of data that needs to be transferred from your origin server, effectively cutting costs. This not only reduces the price you pay for data transfer but also improves site performance and user experience by speeding up the delivery of content. For more such tips, visit our guide on reducing AWS data transfer costs.

5. Optimize CloudFront with Cache Hit Ratio:

By default, CloudFront creates a cache key based on the request’s domain and path, but adjusting these settings can lead to more efficient caching. Strategies such as consolidating application views to generate a single cache key for similar requests and omitting irrelevant query parameters can boost cache efficiency. This approach ensures more requests are served from the cache, reducing latency and origin fetch costs. Our AWS CloudFront Pricing and Cost Guide can help you with further details.

6. Migrate EBS Volumes from gp2 to gp3

Migrating your Amazon EBS volumes from gp2 to gp3 offers a strategic advantage in both performance and cost-efficiency. gp3 volumes provide baseline performance and throughput at a lower cost point than gp2, allowing for up to 20% savings on your storage costs. Additionally, gp3 volumes offer the flexibility to scale throughput independently of storage size, enabling more precise performance tuning according to your application needs. Read our guide on Amazon EBS gp2 vs gp3 volumes to know more. 

AWS Native Cost Optimization and Management Tools

Amazon Web Services offer the following range of built-in cost optimization and management tools that help users keep their cloud spending in check:

1. AWS Budgets: 

AWS Budgets allows users to set custom budget limits for their AWS costs and receive notification alerts when these thresholds are close to being exceeded. The primary benefit is its proactive cost management approach, allowing users to stay within financial boundaries by monitoring and managing their AWS spending in real time. AWS Budgets is positioned as a foundational element for AWS cost control, enabling users to monitor and manage their financial commitments effectively.

2. AWS Cost and Usage Report (AWS CUR): 

The AWS Cost and Usage Report provides a detailed breakdown of AWS usage and costs, enabling in-depth analysis of each service’s cost breakdown. Its distinct feature is the ability to support granular analysis and cost allocation, making it vital for organizations aiming to dissect and optimize their cloud spending comprehensively. AWS CUR is essential for organizations seeking to understand and optimize their cloud spend in detail. For more info, check out our AWS cost and usage report(AWS CUR) guide.

3. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection: 

Utilizing machine learning, this service identifies atypical spending patterns within your AWS account, alerting you to potential inefficiencies or unexpected costs. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is positioned as an intelligent layer of cost monitoring, offering automated alerts to help users swiftly address unexpected cost spikes.

4. AWS Cost Explorer: 

AWS Cost Explorer is an analytics tool that allows users to visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time. With easy-to-use graphical reports and forecasting capabilities, it’s designed to provide insights into cost trends and help with budget planning. AWS Cost Explorer is a key tool for ongoing cost optimization efforts, supporting strategic decision-making.

5. AWS Cost Optimization Hub: 

The AWS Cost Optimization Hub serves as a centralized resource for accessing cost-saving recommendations and best practices across AWS services. It acts as a repository of information and tools needed for cost optimization, making it a comprehensive guide for users aiming to maximize their AWS investment efficiency.

6. AWS Cloud Usage Data Observatory (CUDOs): 

AWS CUDOs provides a dashboard that aggregates and visualizes usage and cost data, making it easier for organizations to understand their cloud footprint. It’s aimed at simplifying the complexity of cloud financial management, offering a clear view of operational metrics and optimization opportunities.

7. AWS Trusted Advisor: 

AWS Trusted Advisor provides real-time guidance to optimize AWS environments for cost reduction, performance enhancement, and improved security. The distinctive feature of AWS Trusted Advisor is its broad coverage of actionable insights and recommendations, which are crucial for maintaining an efficient and secure AWS infrastructure. It is positioned as a comprehensive advisory service, offering optimization recommendations to enhance cloud efficiency and effectiveness.

These AWS native tools and programs are integral for any organization looking to optimize their cloud spending, combining real-time monitoring, strategic planning, and financial commitments to achieve cost efficiency.

Top AWS Cloud Cost Management and Optimization Tools 

Discover the top cloud cost management tools designed to help organizations efficiently monitor, manage, and optimize their cloud spending, ensuring financial clarity and operational excellence across any cloud environment.

1. CloudForecast

👋 Wave Goodbye to Unexpected AWS Costs

CloudForecast simplifies AWS cost management by offering a user-friendly and advanced alternative to native AWS cost management tools with direct, actionable insights into AWS spending and cost-saving opportunities. Designed to enhance financial clarity at the team level, our SaaS tool transforms intricate AWS cost data into accessible insights through daily and monthly reports, alongside specialized ZeroWaste Cost Optimization analysis. CloudForecast highlights critical spending areas, enabling teams to swiftly identify and act on cost-saving opportunities.

CloudForecast enhances team transparency and accountability by allowing customized cost reports tailored to different team needs. Integrating with Slack, Microsoft Teams, and email, it turns the cumbersome process of AWS cost monitoring into a swift, actionable experience. This empowers each team to efficiently manage their AWS costs and take proactive action, preventing overspend and optimizing budget allocation without sacrificing core technical focus

With features like detailed dashboards, granular cost visibility, and advanced reporting tools, we make cloud cost management easy and effective for you.

• Key Features: Daily Cost Reports via Slack, Teams and Email, Cost Optimization Report, Tagging Compliance Report, Custom Financial Insights, Cost Overrun Insights
• Free Trial: 30-Day Free Trial. Credit cards are not required unlike other providers.
• Sign Up Process: Self-service
• Pricing model: Flat pricing based on tiers. Free/$99/$299/$499+ per month. (Pricing Page).

2. Apptio Cloudability

Cloud Cost Management & Optimization

Apptio Cloudability is a cloud cost management and financial optimization tool designed to bring financial accountability to cloud spending. It empowers organizations to monitor, manage, and optimize their cloud costs across any environment with a FinOps approach. By providing granular visibility into cloud spend, Cloudability helps teams make more informed decisions about their cloud investments, ensuring they deliver business value efficiently.

• Key Features: AI-powered data insights, comprehensive cloud cost management, optimization capabilities, and support for FinOps practices. 
• Free Trial: Availability varies; typically requires contacting sales for access.
• Sign-Up Process: Initiate by talking to sales or scheduling a demo.
• Pricing Model: Custom pricing based on the organization’s size, complexity, and specific needs.

3. CloudCheckr from Spot by NetApp

The cloud management solution

CloudCheckr, part of Spot by NetApp, offers a comprehensive cloud management solution focusing on cost optimization, security, and compliance. It enhances resource optimization, governance, and security within a unified solution. CloudCheckr boosts operational efficiency by providing deep visibility into cloud spend, actionable insights for cost reduction, and best practice checks for optimization, potentially lowering cloud expenses by 30% or more. Moreover, it strengthens security and compliance by identifying and rectifying misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, making it a holistic solution for advanced cloud management challenges.

• Key Features: Detailed cost and usage reporting, cost optimization recommendations, security and compliance monitoring, resource utilization and efficiency insights.
• Free Trial: Details typically require direct inquiry.
• Sign-Up Process: Involves contacting sales.
• Pricing Model: Customized pricing based on the specific needs and scale of the customer.

4. CloudZero

Every Engineering Decision Is A Buying Decision

CloudZero offers a cost intelligence platform specifically designed for SaaS companies, enabling them to understand their cloud costs in the context of their business activities. By translating technical metrics into business metrics, CloudZero helps organizations align engineering decisions with business outcomes, optimizing cloud spend while driving growth and efficiency. It focuses on providing real-time cost insights and anomaly detection to prevent budget overruns and identify optimization opportunities.

• Key Features: Real-time anomaly detection, detailed cost analytics and budgeting tools, optimization recommendations, and dimensions for granular cost analysis.
• Free Trial: Unknown
• Sign-Up Process: Start by talking to sales or scheduling a demo to learn more.
• Pricing Model: Operates on a tiered pricing model, specifics of which are provided upon consultation with their sales team. You can request custom pricing. 

5. nOps

Al-Powered AWS FinOps Platform

nOps is a comprehensive cloud cost management tool that offers real-time allocation of cloud spend, detailed cost visibility and reporting, showback reporting, and automated optimization to reduce cloud waste and improve efficiency. Its machine learning-driven platform enhances accountability and transparency, enabling efficient cost allocation and optimization without manual intervention. 

Features include automatic instance scheduler, rightsizing with integrated recommendations, and Compute Copilot for optimizing AWS compute usage with a guarantee on commitment utilization. nOps simplifies the management of cloud resources, allowing teams to focus on innovation while ensuring cost efficiency, backed by a pay-for-savings pricing model that minimizes financial risk.

• Key Features: Real-time AWS resource monitoring, automatic resource scheduling, cost optimization insights, commitment management, AWS compute optimizer, well-architected framework compliance, security and compliance tracking.
• Free Trial: Available.
• Sign-Up Process: Direct signups available, but for better experience demo calls are suggested. 
• Pricing Model: Usually based on the scale of AWS resources managed and specific customer needs.

6. Vantage

Cloud Cost Observability and Optimization.

Vantage offers a straightforward and powerful platform for cloud financial management, focusing on making cost data transparent and actionable. It offers advanced reporting capabilities, allowing users to filter, group, and analyze cloud costs with ease. Additionally, Vantage facilitates cost accountability through its “Unallocated” segment, helping identify untracked spending, and provides a structured view of costs across organizational levels. It simplifies budgeting with customizable threshold alerts and notifications, ensuring you stay informed about your spending trends and remain within budget.

With features like advanced cost reporting, budget allocation, customized alerts, and cost visibility, it  helps organizations understand their cloud spend and identify opportunities for optimization. Its user-friendly interface simplifies the complexity of cloud billing, enabling businesses of all sizes to manage their cloud costs more effectively.

• Key Features: Cost Reporting, Kubernetes, Cost Allocation, Optimization, Cost Recommendation.
• Free Trial: Limited 14-day Free Trial.
• Sign-Up Process: Direct sign ups from the Vantage website.
• Pricing Model: Flat pricing based on tiers. Monthly subscriptions range from free to $30/$200/Custom Pricing. Explore more details on the Vantage Pricing Page.

7. VMware Tanzu CloudHealth

Tackle Your Organization’s Biggest Cloud Challenges

VMware Tanzu CloudHealth is a comprehensive cloud management platform that offers cost optimization, security, and compliance solutions across multi-cloud environments. By providing visibility and actionable insights into cloud spending and resource usage, CloudHealth enables businesses to optimize costs, improve operational efficiency, and ensure security and compliance. It supports a holistic approach to cloud management, integrating with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and VMware environments.

• Key Features: Cost optimization and governance, security and compliance monitoring, multicloud management, granular visibility. 
• Free Trial: Available.
• Sign-Up Process: Involves a consultation with the CloudHealth sales team or scheduling a demo.
• Pricing Model: Custom pricing based on the specific needs and scale of the business.

Top AWS Reserved Instances and Commitment Automation Tools

Explore the leading AWS discount plan and commitment automation tools designed to ensure maximum cost efficiency with minimal effort.

8. ProsperOps

Automatic cloud cost optimization

ProsperOps delivers a fully automated cloud cost management solution, enhancing AWS and GCP discount utilization while minimizing the risks  associated with long-term and inflexible commitments. By utilizing advanced algorithms, it offers continuous optimization, aiming for more than 50% savings on cloud expenditures with least manual effort. What sets ProsperOps apart is its commitment-free savings model, ensuring clients pay only a percentage of savings realized, thus eliminating financial risks from the equation. 

• Key Features: 24/7 automated discount optimization for AWS and GCP, seamless integration with finance and accounting, intuitive dashboard, intelligent showback, dynamic prepay amortization tracking, multi-org reporting.
• Free Trial: Availability varies.
• Sign-Up Process: Generally involves signing up for a demo or directly through their sales contact.
• Pricing Model: Based on a percentage of the savings delivered, ensuring aligned incentives. 

9. Usage.ai

Automated AWS Cost Optimization: The smart way to save on AWS

Usage.ai simplifies AWS cost management by offering a mathematically optimized approach to maximize savings and minimize long-term commitment risks like AWS Savings Plans and RIs. This tool stands out for not just automating the management of AWS discounts for over 50% compute savings but also for enhancing cost visibility and financial operations. With Usage.ai, businesses gain the benefits of an autonomous system, granular reporting, simplified AWS billing, and a unified FinOps dashboard. This dual focus ensures operational efficiency while providing deep insights into spending and savings.

• Key Features: Mathematically optimized discount management, autonomous system for immediate ROI, granular reporting for cost visibility, AWS compute optimizer, smart spend allocation, and a unified FinOps dashboard for comprehensive financial oversight.
• Free Trial: Contact sales to enquire.
• Sign-Up Process: Usually starts with a demo request or directly contacting sales.
• Pricing Model: Details may vary, potentially based on the volume of managed commitments or savings achieved.

10. Zesty

BUILD FAST. STAY COST EFFICIENT. 

Zesty offers an advanced platform for automating the management of cloud resources, specifically targeting the optimization of AWS discount plans. It automates the allocation of AWS discounts, focusing on maximizing savings across all workloads and offering deeper savings for stable ones. Its USP lies in minimizing the financial risk of purchasing one or three-year commitments and maximizing the discount utilization. This helps you reduce the need for DevOps to manually manage discount programs, streamlining operations and minimizing effort. 

• Key Features: Real-time automation of AWS Savings Plans and RIs, cost optimization, and flexible commitment management.
• Free Trial: Confirmation needed with sales. 
• Sign-Up Process: Typically includes a sign-up on their platform or scheduling a demo.
• Pricing Model: May include tiered pricing or a performance-based model, with details available upon inquiry. 

Other AWS Cost Optimization Tools

11. Granulate

Real-time continuous compute optimization

Granulate offers real-time, continuous application performance optimization and capacity management across cloud, on-premise, and hybrid environments. It allows businesses to reduce their cloud and on-prem costs by up to 45% without needing any code changes. Designed for enterprise-scale optimization, Granulate works autonomously to enhance performance and increase capacity across all compute environments, supporting infrastructure on AWS, Azure, and GCP.

• Key Features: Autonomous workload optimization, real-time performance optimization, seamless integration with existing workloads, no code changes required.
• Free Trial: Availability may vary; contact sales for the most current information.
• Sign-Up Process: Typically involves contacting the Granulate team or signing up for a demo call.
• Pricing Model: May offer custom pricing based on the scale of usage and specific business needs. More information can be obtained on the Pricing page. 

12. Pump.co

The Fastest Way to Save 60% on AWS. 

Pump.co introduces group buying for AWS costs, allowing companies with similar AWS usage to combine their needs and access commitment discounts usually available only to large corporations. This approach makes it possible to share unused AWS commitments among companies, ensuring resources are efficiently utilized without being tied to long or rigid contracts. It’s an ideal solution for startups and dynamic businesses needing shorter commitments and the flexibility to adapt to changing workloads. 

• Key Features: Group buying for AWS commitments, AI-driven savings optimization, transparent savings estimates, and flexible management of AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances.
• Free Trial: Contact sales to know the details. 
• Sign-Up Process: Usually starts with a request for a demo or signing up on their platform.
• Pricing Model: Pricing details vary and are typically based on the services used or the amount saved. More information can be obtained on the Pricing page. 

13. Xosphere

Save up to 80% on your EC2 costs.

Xosphere specializes in reducing Amazon EC2 costs through smart utilization of AWS Spot Instances. Xosphere’s Instance Orchestrator tool enables businesses to enjoy the cost benefits of AWS’s excess capacity at discounts of up to 80-90% compared to On-Demand rates. This system seamlessly integrates with Amazon Auto Scaling Groups to monitor and adjust the balance between Spot and On-Demand instances, ensuring optimal cost savings without compromising application availability.

• Key Features: Automated Spot instance management, integration with Amazon Auto Scaling Groups, dynamic switching between Spot and On-Demand instances to maximize uptime and cost savings.
• Free Trial: Available.
• Sign-Up Process: Involves signing up for a demo or directly contacting the sales..
• Pricing Model: It’s not clear if Xosphere offers a tiered pricing or custom quotes based on the complexity and size of the cloud environment. The exact subscription pricing is not visible or transparent (pricing page). 

Final Thoughts

Choosing the right cloud cost management and optimization tools is crucial for efficiently managing AWS spending. The tools we’ve discussed offer a range of features that cater to different needs, from automating AWS discount plans to providing actionable insights for reducing costs. By leveraging these solutions, organizations can achieve significant savings, enhance operational efficiency, and maintain control over their cloud expenses. 

Remember, the key to effective cloud cost management lies in understanding your specific requirements and selecting tools that align with your financial and operational goals. With the right approach, you can ensure your cloud investments are both cost-effective and performance-driven.