The most expensive part of my AWS setup wasn’t compute ($1,000 bill)

The author's $1,000 AWS bill was dominated not by compute but by network primitives (NAT Gateway, load balancer), data transfer, and logging. By removing NAT, replacing ALB with API Gateway + VPC Link, and simplifying the network, costs were significantly reduced. The key insight is that at small-to-mid scale, cloud costs are often driven by surrounding infrastructure rather than compute itself.