Unattached (orphan) EBS volumes
An EBS volume bills for the size you provisioned whether or not it is attached to anything. Volumes left behind by terminated instances stay on the invoice indefinitely.
What this problem is
EBS charges per provisioned gigabyte-month, and the charge has nothing to do with usage: an empty 500 GB volume costs exactly what a full one costs. What drives the bill is the size you asked for and how long it existed.
Orphan volumes nearly always arrive the same way. An EC2 instance is terminated, but the volume had DeleteOnTermination switched off — the default for non-root volumes — so it outlives the instance. Because it no longer shows up on any EC2 screen, nobody thinks about it again. It sits in the available state, attached to nothing, billing every month.
This is waste that compounds. Any single volume is cheap enough not to draw attention, which is exactly why an account a few years old tends to carry dozens of them scattered across regions. The total is rarely small.
How we detect it
We list every volume in every enabled region with DescribeVolumes and isolate those in the available state — available meaning, literally, attached to nothing. Each volume's type and size come from the same call.
- Unattached (orphan) EBS volumes
What it costs
A gp3 volume runs about $0.08 per GB-month and gp2 about $0.10 per GB-month (us-east-1). One forgotten 1 TB gp2 volume costs close to $100 a month.
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.
Does your account have this?
The scan is read-only and shows you what it found before you pay for anything.
Run a free scan