The amount of people believing made up tweets like this below is concerning
For some reason no one stopped to check what “our startup” means on a consulting account
In the next tweet it’s “We were paying $15K/month for an RDS Postgres instance.”
Blue check != it’s real
Kubernetes migration almost killed our startup.
Where we were:
- 8 EC2 instances
- Ansible for deploys
- Boring but working
- $1200/month AWS bill
Why we migrated:
- New investor wanted 'cloud-native'
- Engineers wanted K8s experience
- Competitors were using it
- Seemed like the future
6 months later:
- 3 engineers spending full-time on K8s
- AWS bill at $4500/month
- Deploys took longer than before
- More outages, not fewer
- Product development stalled
We rolled back:
- Moved to ECS Fargate
- 2 week migration
- Back to $1800/month
- Engineers back on features
K8s is amazing for scale. We weren't at scale. Technology should solve problems you actually have.
After the made-up story of how they saved their startup by spending $1,800 per month on AWS the next made-up story is suddenly spending $52/month on AWS
Sure
Cut our AWS bill from $52K to $18K per month. Took 3 weeks of detective work.
The audit:
- Started with AWS Cost Explorer
- Noticed NAT Gateway was $8K/month
- Data transfer was $12K/month
- RDS storage was $6K/month
What we found:
- Logs were being sent to S3 via NAT Gateway
- Should have used VPC Endpoint (free)
- RDS had 14TB of automated backups
- Retention was set to 90 days
- Old snapshots from deleted databases
The fixes:
- VPC Endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB
- Backup retention to 7 days
- Deleted 200+ orphaned snapshots
- Moved development to Spot instances
Nov 7, 2025 · 11:45 AM UTC
Welcome to accounts that discovered that traffic on their social media account leads to business
And how making things up —> more traffic
And starting to optimise for this - who can check anyway?
Yes ~3 stories per day of how “we cut back our cloud spending by $$$”
“Fluff-writing is at all-time high”
Agree
It’s also what social media algorithms reward (plus outrage), sadly
saying this as a fellow product marketer in dev tools: benchmarks and fluff writing are at an all-time high. sadly it’s all coming from the top for pure optics. every optimization hack is just optics, ask them to share the archi with benchmarks or a video grab of the actuals, and there will be crickets.
