AWS Bill Exploded to $50K: AI Debug-Logging Disaster

The financial nightmare

Your AWS bill jumped from $1,200 to $48,000 overnight. CloudWatch logs are consuming 15TB per day, eating your entire marketing budget. Every API call generates megabytes of verbose debug output. Your startup's runway just got cut in half by logging costs alone.

How AI created this cost disaster

AI tools sprinkled console.log statements everywhere during development, logging entire request objects, database queries, and response payloads. They never distinguished between development and production environments, treating logging like free debugging instead of realizing CloudWatch charges per GB ingested.

The cost reduction strategy

1. Removed verbose debug logging from production
2. Implemented log levels and filtering
3. Added log rotation and archival policies
4. Set up cost alerts and monitoring

The savings

Monthly AWS costs dropped 95% from $48,000 to $1,200. Log storage decreased from 15TB to 300GB daily while maintaining all essential debugging information. We implemented smart log levels that capture errors and warnings without the noise, plus automatic cost alerts to prevent future surprises.