Service guide
How to reduce AWS S3 costs
S3 is cheap per gigabyte and expensive in aggregate, because nothing in S3 deletes itself. Buckets accumulate for years — old versions, failed uploads, logs, data nobody has read since 2023 — all in Standard tier, all billing monthly, forever.
The free scan ranks your buckets by cost, flags missing lifecycle policies and surfaces the invisible storage classes of waste.
Run the free scanWhere S3 bills accumulate
- →No lifecycle policies at all. The default finding: buckets with years of accumulation and no rules. Lifecycle policies are free, take minutes to write, and work retroactively — transition to Infrequent Access at 30 days, Glacier at 90, delete at whatever your retention actually requires.
- →Invisible old versions. Versioning-enabled buckets keep every overwritten and deleted object unless a policy expires noncurrent versions. A bucket can show 100 GB of current data and bill for 900 GB of history — visible only in storage metrics, not the console object list.
- →Incomplete multipart uploads. Failed large uploads leave orphaned parts that bill as storage and appear nowhere in the object listing. One lifecycle rule (AbortIncompleteMultipartUpload, 7 days) ends them permanently for the whole bucket.
- →Everything in Standard. Backups, exports, compliance archives — data touched yearly — priced for millisecond access. Standard-IA is ~45% cheaper, Glacier tiers ~80–95% cheaper. Intelligent-Tiering automates the decision for unpredictable access patterns.
- →Duplicate copies of big data. The same dataset in the data lake, the analytics bucket, the ML bucket and someone’s backup bucket. Cross-team copies are the S3 equivalent of environment sprawl — findable by size ranking your buckets.
Put numbers on it
Frequently asked questions
Are lifecycle transitions risky for data we might need?
Transitions never delete anything — objects move tiers and stay fully retrievable (Standard-IA instantly, Glacier tiers in minutes to hours). Only explicit expiration rules delete, and those you set to your actual retention requirement. The risk of a lifecycle policy is paying retrieval fees occasionally; the cost of no policy is paying Standard rates forever.
How do I find what’s actually costing money in S3?
S3 Storage Lens (free tier) breaks storage down by bucket, tier and version status — it is where invisible old versions and multipart debris show up. Our scan reads the same signals and prices each finding per bucket.
£499 fixed. Free scan first. 20%+ found or it’s free.
The scan is read-only — a role you create and delete, no keys shared — and shows your estimated monthly saving before anyone talks about money.