Why Your Cloud Bill Is Taking Away Your Money. How You Can Stop It

If you are nodding your head you are not alone. Most Canadian medium sized businesses we talk to are spending too much money, on cloud services by about thirty to forty percent. This is not because Amazon is taking advantage of you although that might be a part of it. The main reason is that you are paying what is called the “Lazy Tax” on your cloud services.

Here is what’s really going on with your money and how you can put a stop to losing it.

1. The “Zombie” Servers

This is the classic. a developer spins up a massive server to test a new feature for a couple of days and then a Slack message pops up, a bug is found and the server keeps running. And billing of course. For months!

We once audited a client and found a $800/month database instance that hadn’t had a single connection in six months. That’s $5,000 of pure profit set on fire, just because nobody bothered to turn the lights off.

The Fix: You need automated “Reaper” scripts. If a development server isn’t being used at 2 AM, shut it down. If it hasn’t been touched in a week, kill it.

2. The “Just in Case” Problem

Engineers are risk-averse. If they think an app might need 8GB of RAM, they’ll provision 16GB, “just to be safe.”

It sounds responsible, but it’s expensive. In the cloud, you pay for what you provision, not what you use. If you rent a massive truck to carry a single pizza, you still pay for the truck.

The Fix: Look at your metrics. If your CPU usage never goes above 10%, downgrade the instance. It takes five minutes and saves 50% immediately.

3. The Canadian Kicker (The USD Trap)

Here is the one that really hurts us up North.

Almost all public cloud pricing is in USD. When you budgeted for that project last year, the exchange rate might have been different. Today? You’re paying a massive premium just to convert your CAD to pay Jeff Bezos.

The Fix: This one is harder, but architectural choices matter. Are you moving data across regions unnecessarily? Are you paying for “egress fees” you don’t need? Every wasted gigabyte costs you 1.35x more than your American competitors.

Stop the Bleeding

Look, you don’t need to hire a full-time “Cloud Economist.” You just need to stop treating your cloud bill like a utility that you have to pay no matter what.

It’s not a tax. It’s a variable cost, and you can control it.

We can help. At ERMI Labs, we do a Cloud Cost Audit. We usually find enough savings in the first week to pay for our entire fee for the year.

Stop paying for servers that don’t do anything. Let’s review your bill.