The Best AWS Cost Optimization Tools in 2026: Native and Third-Party

Start with AWS's own tools, because most of them cost nothing. Cost Optimization Hub collects rightsizing, idle-resource, Savings Plans, and Reserved Instance recommendations across your accounts at no additional charge, and Compute Optimizer and Cost Anomaly Detection are free too. Add a third-party tool when you want the work done for you: commitments bought and managed as your usage moves, fixes applied in your account, or changes shipped as pull requests to the infrastructure code your team already reviews.

We read AWS's documentation and pricing pages, and each vendor's own product, docs, and pricing pages, in October 2026. For every tool we note what it optimizes on AWS, whether it acts or only advises, how a change reaches production, and how it charges. We make LevelFour, so it comes first among the third-party tools. Each claim links to the page it came from. If you also run Azure or Google Cloud, our roundup of the best cloud cost optimization tools covers tools for more than one cloud.

What should an AWS cost optimization tool do?

Does it act, or only advise?

A recommendation saves nothing until someone applies it, and your engineers fit that work around everything else they own. AWS's tools mostly recommend. Third-party tools differ in how far they go: some open a ticket, some open a pull request, and some make the change in your account.

Which AWS services does it cover?

On many bills, RDS, EBS, S3, NAT gateways, CloudWatch logs, and EKS add up to as much as EC2. Check the list of services a tool optimizes against the services that lead your own bill. How to reduce your AWS bill prices the usual fix for each of them.

How does it buy Savings Plans and Reserved Instances?

Commitments lower the rate you pay for steady usage. Tools buy them in different ways: in small, frequent increments, with a guarantee that pays you back for unused commitments, or on terms as short as 30 days. Ask what happens to your discount when usage drops. Savings Plans vs Reserved Instances works through the choice with real EC2 rates.

Does it fit your infrastructure as code?

When Terraform or CloudFormation manages a resource, a change made in the console drifts from the code, and the next apply can undo it. A tool that edits the code keeps the saving in place and leaves your review process as it is.

How does it charge?

Commitment managers, and some platforms, take a share of the savings they realize. Others charge a subscription, or a rate per dollar of spend they track. A share of realized savings means you pay when the bill drops, and only then.

Can it prove the saving on the bill?

An estimated saving is a forecast. Look for a tool that reads the bill after the change and reports what you saved, resource by resource.

What do AWS's own cost tools do, and what do they cost?

Every AWS account already has these. Two of them need an opt-in, so switch them on before you pay for anything else.

AWS Cost Explorer

Cost Explorer shows the last 13 months of cost and usage and forecasts the next 18 months. AWS Cost Explorer docs. Its Reserved Instance recommendations cover EC2, RDS, ElastiCache, OpenSearch, Redshift, MemoryDB, and DynamoDB, from 7, 30, or 60 days of usage, and its EC2 rightsizing page now sends you to Cost Optimization Hub. The console is free; the API costs $0.01 per request. Cost Explorer pricing.

AWS Cost Optimization Hub and Compute Optimizer

Cost Optimization Hub gathers rightsizing, idle deletion, Savings Plans, and Reserved Instance recommendations across your accounts and Regions, removes the duplicates, and prices each one with your own discounts. Cost Optimization Hub docs. You opt in to it, and its rightsizing results appear once you also opt in to Compute Optimizer. Getting started.

Compute Optimizer reads 14 days of usage by default and can take EC2 memory metrics from Datadog or Dynatrace. Compute Optimizer docs. Since November 2025, its automation rules snapshot and delete unattached EBS volumes and upgrade volume types on a schedule you set, and you can reverse the changes. Automation rules · AWS announcement.

AWS Trusted Advisor

Trusted Advisor's cost checks cover Savings Plans and Reserved Instance purchases, idle NAT gateways and load balancers, and Elastic IPs with nothing attached. Cost optimization checks. The full set of checks comes with Business Support+, from $29 a month per account, and with the higher support plans. Trusted Advisor docs.

AWS Budgets and Cost Anomaly Detection

AWS Budgets alerts you before spend passes the line you set, and its monitoring and notifications are free. AWS Budgets pricing. Cost Anomaly Detection checks your spend about three times a day and ranks the service, account, Region, and usage type behind a spike. Anomaly Detection docs.

AWS FinOps Agent

AWS put the AWS FinOps Agent in public preview on June 9, 2026. AWS announcement. Built on Bedrock, it answers cost questions in plain language, investigates anomalies, schedules reports, and turns Cost Optimization Hub and Compute Optimizer recommendations into Jira tickets. FinOps Agent docs. By default it works in read-only mode on AWS's billing and cost tools, and it costs nothing during the preview, within a monthly usage limit. FinOps Agent FAQ.

AWS's tools find most of the savings on an account and act on some of them, such as EBS cleanup. The ten tools below add commitments bought and adjusted as your usage moves, changes applied across services, and pull requests to your infrastructure code.

The ten third-party tools at a glance

1. LevelFour

LevelFour finds the waste across your AWS bill, prices each saving against what the resources cost today, and ships it the way your team picks.

• Savings across 53 AWS services, from EC2, RDS, and EBS to NAT gateways, CloudWatch logs, S3, and EKS. LevelFour on AWS.
• Each saving applied in your AWS account with write access that covers that one change and then expires (Automated Savings), shipped as an infrastructure-as-code pull request your engineers merge, or given as manual steps.
• Savings Plans and Reserved Instances bought and renewed, and Reserved Instances you no longer need resold. Commitments.
• Savings Audit, which reads the bill after each change and confirms the saving resource by resource.
• Forecasts, plus budgets and cost alerts that post to Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, or any webhook, and an MCP server and CLI for engineers and their AI agents.

Creditas had a year to reach its cost-reduction goal and reached it in 45 days with LevelFour, says Rafael Leonardo, Principal Engineer at Creditas.

Pricing: Cloud Savings costs 30% of realized savings, and nothing if nothing is saved. Plans with Governance & Visibility start at $30 a month. See pricing.

Best for: teams that want AWS savings applied or merged as code, then confirmed on the bill.

2. ProsperOps

ProsperOps runs AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances on its own. Flexera acquired ProsperOps in January 2026, and ProsperOps keeps its own brand. Flexera announcement.

• Adaptive Laddering, which buys commitments in small, high-frequency increments that expire on a regular schedule, across AWS services including EC2, Lambda, Fargate, RDS, and ElastiCache. ProsperOps for AWS.
• Support for AWS Database Savings Plans, in early access. ProsperOps.
• ProsperOps+, launched in June 2026, which adds Flexera's Ocean and Elastigroup compute automation on outcome-based pricing. ProsperOps+.

Pricing: a small percentage of the realized savings, not of your cloud spend. ProsperOps pricing.

Best for: teams that want AWS commitment coverage run for them by a specialist.

3. nOps

nOps automates AWS commitments and compute.

• Savings Plans and Reserved Instances adjusted every hour across EC2, Fargate, Lambda, RDS, ElastiCache, Redshift, OpenSearch, DynamoDB, and SageMaker, including changes to Convertible RIs. nOps rate optimization.
• Spot for EKS with Karpenter or Cluster Autoscaler, for AWS Batch, and for Auto Scaling groups, where nOps advertises 60-minute advanced Spot termination protection. nOps compute.
• A guarantee of 100% utilization of nOps-managed commitments, with the difference credited under its terms. nOps.

Pricing: rate optimization as a share of the savings, visibility on a fixed fee by spend, and a 14-day free trial. nOps pricing.

Best for: teams with large commitment portfolios and workloads that run on Spot.

4. Vantage

Vantage reports cost across cloud, Kubernetes, SaaS, and AI, and automates AWS commitments.

• Autopilot, which buys Compute and Database Savings Plans. Automatic buying stays off until you turn it on, and Autopilot never changes your infrastructure. Autopilot docs.
• A FinOps Agent that buys Compute Savings Plans and Reserved Instances for RDS, OpenSearch, ElastiCache, and Redshift, on its own or after an approval in Slack. Vantage FinOps Agent.
• Cost reports, budgets, and virtual tags across your providers.

Pricing: free up to $2,500 of tracked spend a month, $30 a month up to $7,500, $200 a month up to $20,000, then custom. Autopilot takes 5% of the savings it realizes. Vantage pricing · Autopilot.

Best for: teams that want self-serve cost reports with published prices and automated Savings Plans.

5. Archera

Archera buys AWS commitments and insures them against unused capacity.

• Native Reserved Instances and Savings Plans bought inside your own AWS organization, with commitments managed across all reservable AWS services. Archera for AWS.
• Guaranteed commitments with terms as short as 30 days, a Rebate Guarantee that pays cash back, and a Release Guarantee, insured through an A+ rated carrier. Archera pricing.

Pricing: the platform and native commitments are free. Guaranteed commitments carry a premium, a share of the savings billed through AWS Marketplace. Archera pricing.

Best for: teams that want commitment discounts on shorter terms.

6. Zesty

Zesty manages AWS commitments and automates storage and pods on EKS.

• Commitment Manager, which runs a dynamic portfolio of Savings Plans for EC2 and database spend. Zesty Commitment Manager.
• Persistent volume autoscaling on EKS, built on EBS, that grows and shrinks storage. Support for workloads other than StatefulSets is in beta. Zesty docs.
• Pod rightsizing and replica tuning on EKS 1.28 and later, with in-place resizing from 1.33. Zesty docs.

Pricing: based on usage and realized savings. Zesty pricing.

Best for: EKS teams with storage and commitment waste.

7. DoiT

DoiT pairs its Cloud Intelligence analytics with the PerfectScale products.

• Cloud Intelligence, which splits shared EKS clusters by consumption, traces NAT and egress costs, and runs more than 800 checks. DoiT platform.
• PerfectScale for Commitments, which buys AWS Savings Plans and Database Savings Plans on its own or after an approval per purchase. DoiT.
• PerfectScale for Kubernetes on EKS: Podfit rightsizes CPU and memory and tunes HPA and KEDA, and Infrafit picks node types. PerfectScale.

Pricing: Essentials is free, Enhanced and Enterprise are priced per customer, and PerfectScale Community is free up to 300 vCPUs a month. DoiT pricing.

Best for: teams that want analytics, Kubernetes tuning, and commitment automation from one partner.

8. Datadog Cloud Cost Management

Datadog Cloud Cost Management puts AWS cost next to the monitoring data of the same services.

• The AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR 2.0) at hourly granularity, with up to 15 months of history. Datadog setup for AWS.
• Recommendations for EC2, Auto Scaling groups, Lambda, ECS, RDS, Redshift, ElastiCache, OpenSearch, EBS, S3, NAT gateways, and more, some drawn from Cost Optimization Hub. Datadog recommendations.
• Scheduled automations that run 12 AWS actions, such as deleting unattached EBS volumes, moving gp2 volumes to gp3, and deleting unused EC2, RDS, or NAT resources, with optional approval in Slack or Microsoft Teams. They run on Datadog Workflows, billed separately. Datadog automations.
• Savings Plan simulation, in preview. Datadog commitment programs.

Pricing: Pro from $5 per $1,000 of monthly spend, billed annually ($7.20 on demand), and Enterprise from $10 per $1,000. Datadog pricing.

Best for: teams that already run their observability on Datadog.

9. CloudZero

CloudZero allocates AWS spend and reports it as unit cost.

• CostFormation, which CloudZero says allocates 100% of your spend in hours, whatever the state of your tags. CloudZero platform.
• Unit cost such as cost per customer or per feature, anomaly detection, and access from Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex through MCP.
• AWS recommendations from its own checks and from Cost Optimization Hub and Compute Optimizer. CloudZero AWS recommendations.

Pricing: one subscription with every capability, by custom quote. CloudZero pricing.

Best for: companies that measure AWS cost against customers and features.

10. Cast AI

Cast AI automates EKS clusters.

• Node provisioning, Spot with automated fallback and interruption handling, CPU and memory rightsizing, bin-packing, and Container Live Migration. Cast AI on AWS.
• Rightsizing, bin-packing, and Spot management on top of Karpenter. Cast AI and Karpenter.
• Available on AWS Marketplace.

Pricing: by quote, based on your environment, with a 30-day free trial. Cast AI pricing · Cast AI.

Best for: teams whose AWS spend sits in EKS clusters.

How to choose an AWS cost optimization tool

1. Turn on AWS's free tools

Opt in to Cost Optimization Hub and Compute Optimizer, set a budget with alerts, and keep Cost Anomaly Detection on. They cost nothing and show you where the money goes.

2. Find what drives the bill

Group Cost Explorer by service for the last three months. When steady EC2, RDS, or Lambda usage on on-demand rates leads the list, a commitment manager covers most of the gap. When the waste spreads across EBS, NAT gateways, logs, and idle resources, look for a tool that covers and fixes those services.

3. Decide how changes reach production

If Terraform or CloudFormation manages your stack, prefer a tool that changes the code through a pull request. If your team wants changes made for it, check how the tool scopes and logs its write access.

4. Match the pricing to the outcome

A share of realized savings ties the fee to what lands on the bill. A subscription or a rate per dollar of spend fits when reporting and allocation are the main need.

5. Trial with read-only access

Most of these tools start read-only. Compare the savings each one estimates, then check the bill a month after the first changes ship.

Common mistakes when cutting the AWS bill

• Buying a three-year commitment before rightsizing, which locks a discount onto capacity you don't need.
• Leaving Cost Optimization Hub and Compute Optimizer off. Both are free, and both wait for an opt-in.
• Resizing in the console a resource that Terraform manages. The next apply can bring the old size back.
• Counting estimated savings as real ones instead of checking the bill after each change.
• Expecting cost checks from Trusted Advisor on the Basic plan. They come with Business Support+ and the higher plans.

LevelFour finds the waste across 53 AWS services, applies each saving or ships it as a pull request, and confirms it on your bill. See what LevelFour can save you in 5 minutes, with read-only access.

Frequently asked questions