Every line item on the bill earns its place. OpsPuls runs on ECS Fargate with right-sized tasks, a single RDS PostgreSQL instance, SQS with dead-letter queues for durability, and SES for transactional mail — all defined in Terraform across global, dev and prod workspaces.
The biggest lever wasn't a clever discount; it was deleting things. I retired Datadog APM via a two-step Terraform provider migration and moved to CloudWatch-only, with a planned Grafana Cloud Free path — saving roughly $200/month in observability alone.
The lesson: infrastructure cost is a design constraint, not an afterthought. When you own the whole stack, frugality is just good engineering.