Planetek runs a standing portfolio of twelve live AWS demo environments: a full serverless web application, a data lake with three million real public records, an event mesh, a container works, a GenAI assistant, a document-intelligence pipeline, and more. Add the demo hub and the website you are reading, and it is fourteen deployments serving strangers on the internet around the clock.
In July 2026, the AWS bill for all of it was $8.84.
That number is not a stunt and it is not hidden in fine print. Our operations demo publishes the current month's ledger straight from Cost Explorer, so you can check what the figure is right now. The bill stays in single digits because every environment follows the same short list of rules, and those rules transfer directly to real workloads.
Rule one: nothing idles for money
The single biggest decision was banning always-on infrastructure that bills by the hour. Across all twelve environments there are no NAT gateways, no load balancers, no database instances, and no container services running around the clock. Every workload is built from services that bill by request: Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, API Gateway, EventBridge.
Where a workload genuinely needs a heavier engine, it scales to zero instead of idling. Our relational database demo runs Aurora Serverless v2 configured to pause completely after five idle minutes; when a visitor arrives, the page shows the database waking, and answers arrive in under twenty seconds. Our container demo launches a real Fargate task per visitor run and pays for seconds of compute, not a standing service.
Rule two: expensive things exist only while someone is looking
Three of the environments demonstrate services that bill meaningfully per day just for being enabled: continuous compliance tooling, a multi-AZ network with flow logs, and the relational database. Those run on a deploy-demo-teardown cycle. The infrastructure is a few minutes of Terraform away, we bring it up for demonstrations, and a scheduled job tears down anything left running overnight. The evidence each deployment produces, compliance reports and network proofs, is persisted and stays readable between windows, so the pages never go blank.
Rule three: budgets that page us, not surprise us
Two AWS Budgets watch the account: a $15 infrastructure tripwire that fires long before anything is actually wrong, and a hard monthly cap alert at $100. Anything unusual sends email the same day it starts, not on the invoice three weeks later. Public-facing demos also carry their own daily usage counters in DynamoDB, so a burst of traffic hits a polite limit instead of our wallet.
What we deliberately pay for
Cost engineering is not refusing to spend. It is knowing what you are buying. The largest line items in July were AWS Config for the compliance work, a web application firewall, and VPC interface endpoints. The firewall is the deliberate one: a single shared web ACL fronts all of our CloudFront distributions with a per-IP rate limit and Amazon's IP reputation lists. It blocks several thousand hostile requests a day across the sites, and we decided that was worth roughly eight dollars a month of standing cost.
The July 2026 ledger in one line: fourteen public deployments, thousands of visitor requests, several thousand blocked probes a day, one bill under nine dollars, with the current month published live on the ops demo.
What this means for your bill
Your production workload is not a demo portfolio, and we would never promise you a nine-dollar month. Real businesses have real traffic, data that must stay hot, and compliance obligations that bill daily. But in most AWS accounts we assess, a meaningful share of spend is structural rather than useful: idle capacity waiting for traffic that arrives in bursts, oversized instances, orphaned volumes and addresses, and environments nobody has looked at in months.
The rules above are how we think about every account we touch, and they are behind more than a million dollars in documented savings at employers and clients over the years. If you want that lens on your own bill, the fixed-fee assessment in our managed AWS services covers architecture, security, and spend, and the roadmap is yours to keep either way.
Questions about a specific line on your AWS bill? Email info@planetek.org or book a free consultation. More notes live on the Insights page.