[icedchai]

Can you use spot instances? If so you can pay a lot less for compute. Your app needs to tolerate being shutdown and restarted, however.

Is there anything you can turn off at night? A lot of startups have staging / test systems that do not need to be running all the time.

Are you keeping a lot of "junk" around that you don't actually need? Look at S3 objects, EBS snapshots, etc. A few here and there doesn't cost much, but it does add up.

Are you using the correct EBS volume type? Maybe you're using provisioned IOPS where you don't need it.

S3: make sure your VPC has an S3 endpoint. This isn't the default. Otherwise, you're paying a lot more to transfer data to S3.