Not only this, but perhaps even more nefarious is that AWS gives lots of startups $100k+ in credits. This feels generous when you get it. In reality, it means that (unless you are in a compute intensive startup) you can go for months or years before you hit this, but by the time you do, you already have very solid monthly spend.

Initially, you picked the Multi-ZA RDS db.t3.2xlarge instance because you figured "eh i have credits anyway". Two years later, someone looks at this and says "hey, this is expensive and I bet we can do everything we need on a machine half the size". But then they think "if i downsize it and that works, i'll get a thumbs up emoji on a slack thread. If i downsize it and it causes problems, i'll draw the ire of the whole team. I better leave it alone." And the truth is... by the time your company hits the end of those credits, you're probably at the point where that savings isn't gonna do much. Or maybe you are out of business.

And that is how almost every successful company that uses AWS eventually ends up paying six-figures or more annually.