A Cheapskates Guide to AWS (Updated for 2025).pdf

Presented at the RVA Software Development User Group on September 23, 2025

While AWS is very affordable, it can get really costly for the average at-home user. The free tier is a great way to get started but how do you use AWS long-term while keeping costs low? Michael Soh, unashamed cheap skate and chaos engineer, shares his journey into AWS and how the average user can get the most out of their dollars.

This work is released via the CC-BY-SA license.

1. A Cheapskate’s Guide to AWS
Michael Soh

2. Definition of a Cheapskate
●Flexible: Quality and Time
●Constraint: Cost
●Take advantage of free or low-cost services
●Use services outside of their intended purpose (e.g. use GitHub to serve web
pages)

Do as much as possible as cheaply as possible, regardless of time and quality.

3. What is NOT a Cheapskate
●Gaming the system
●Taking advantage of unsuspecting organizations or individuals
○Cryptomining on unsuspecting visitors to your website
○Vulnerability-based or other grey-web applications (e.g. unpublished APIs, shared API keys, etc)
●Violating TOS or Acceptable Use Guidelines

4. An Ethical Cheapskate’s Guide to AWS
Michael Soh

5. AWS Free Tier
●AWS has a new credit system for their free tier!
●Many AWS Services are available for free either for a limited time or forever but
under certain thresholds
○https://aws.amazon.com/free
●Understand what is free now and won’t be later
○Use $200 in credits to access:
■Compute: EC2, RDS, ECS, etc.
■Storage: EFS, S3, etc
○Lambda, DynamoDB, CodeCommit are free in perpetuity, with some limitations
●Learn where to save money
○Reserved Instances if you want a VPS-like experience (or just use Lightsail)
○EC2 Savings Plans are useful if you have unpredictable scaling needs
○If you’re feeling lucky (and particularly cheap):
■Move your DB to the same EC2 instance as your web server
■Containerize your web server through self-managed Docker

6. mikesoh.com -- Use Case
●Grew up from a cPanel-based LAMP stack to fully-managed AWS LAMP* stack
(Linux, nginx docker with a node.js container for serving e-mail)
●Primarily used to host hundreds of email addresses used for spam avoidance and
detection
●VERY few public visitors
●Bandwidth concerns minimal
●Goal: $20 / month

7. Let’s Focus on After 6 months on AWS Free Tier
All Prices are as of September 2025, based on us-east-1 (Northern Virginia)





In General:
●Compute tends to be the cost you need to control. Storage is often a drop in the
bucket
Service Cost / 30-day Month
EC2 (t4g.small) On-Demand $12.096
EC2 (t4g.small) Reserved (1 year) $7.56
Equivalent Lightsail (incl. 60 GB SSD)$12

8. Other Ways to Reduce Cost
●GitHub for overall code-repository
○EC2 deployment code, VPC Configuration
○GitHub private repos for configuration data
●S3 Deep Archive for backups
○Database Backups, etc.
●AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store for secrets storage
○AWS Secrets Manager has an on-going cost and has features that benefit enterprise users but not
necessarily home users
●Use Spot Instances when testing new configurations
○8-hour t4g.micro is usually $0.024 (subject to fluctuations)
●Cloudflare for free domain resolution
○Route 53 is pretty cheap ($0.50 / zone, $0.40 / 1M queries) but...
○Cloudflare is free and offers DDOS mitigation out of the box

9. Things can go bad if you’re not careful
●Single-point of failure
○DevOps, DevOps, DevOps
●Personal Solutions are rarely “Enterprise Solutions”
○Hosting email on the same system as your web server may work for me personally, but would never
do this in a production, enterprise environment
●Walled-Garden
○Too Much Dependence on AWS
●Single-Source-of-Truth can be difficult if not managed correctly
○“Where did I put the ssh keys? Are they in the same place as the ssh configuration?”
●Know your risks!

10. $15*
My Monthly AWS Bill

11. Questions?
Comments?
sohmc