Ditching CloudWatch Logs for CloudTrail: How I Cut CloudWatch Costs by Over Half on a Recent Project

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve ever set up CloudTrail and just… left the default CloudWatch Logs integration running, you’re probably paying more than you need to. I know I was.

The setup is almost too easy - CloudTrail ships events to a CloudWatch log group, you get a unified place to search logs, maybe you wire up a few metric filters for alerts. Done. Except the bill quietly grows every month and you don’t really notice until you actually look at it.

Cost-Optimization on Daniel Ancuta

Ditching CloudWatch Logs for CloudTrail: How I Cut CloudWatch Costs by Over Half on a Recent Project