[Infrastructure]February 18, 2026·10 min read
Halving Your Kubernetes Cloud Bill
The technical details of dropping a $48K/month AWS bill to $15K.
Engineering Team
Engineering · Production
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The technical details of dropping a $48K/month AWS bill to $15K.
A SaaS client's AWS spend was out of control. Through workload analysis, batch predictability and the right hosting choice we cut $33K/month in cost.
The right host beats every multi-strategy optimization combined.
Hetzner's dedicated servers run at roughly 75% less than equivalent AWS on-demand. The trade-off is operational overhead — which is why Terraform + ArgoCD discipline isn't optional.
Spot instances and hybrid strategies offer marginal wins. The big gain comes from not running on the wrong server. Know your workload first, pick the provider second.
We shipped dozens of LLM-backed products. Which patterns scaled, which collapsed — field notes from production.
Next.js 16, Tailwind v4, server components, the edge runtime — what should you actually build a web product with in 2026?