Stopped instances still paying for storage
Stopping an instance zeroes the compute charge and leaves the disk charge untouched. Attached EBS volumes keep billing full size.
What this problem is
Stopping an EC2 instance is the right move when you do not need it right now: the hourly compute charge stops that same hour. What catches people out is that this is the only charge that stops. The attached EBS volumes still exist, still occupy provisioned space, and are still billed in full.
That makes sense: it is precisely because the disks stay that you can start the machine again and find everything as you left it. Stopping is a pause, not an ending. The problem is the pause that became permanent — the instance stopped "for now" fourteen months ago, whose 500 GB disk never stopped billing.
The decision here is between stopping and terminating, and it is not a technical one: it is about how long it still makes sense to keep that state. If the answer is "I don't know", a snapshot costs half the price of the volume and preserves the contents — terminating after the snapshot keeps the option open for less money.
How we detect it
We list instances with DescribeInstances, filter those in the stopped state, and cross them with DescribeVolumes to total the storage still attached to each.
- Stopped instances still paying for EBS
What it costs
Storage keeps running at about $0.08 per GB-month on gp3 and $0.10 on gp2 (us-east-1). A stopped instance with 500 GB attached costs roughly $40 a month while executing nothing.
Public AWS list prices, us-east-1, subject to change. The figure in your report is computed against your resources in your regions.
How it appears in the report
An illustrative example, with invented resources and figures. In the report each finding carries the real resource, its region, and the fix command where a safe one exists.
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