Cloud credits ending? 60, 30 and 7 days out

The bill you have never seen

Startup credit programs are generous, and they change how a team builds. When the bill is covered, nobody needs to look at it. Test servers stay up, databases get sized for a launch that never came, and logs pile up. All of it is invisible because the invoice says $0.

Then the credits expire or run out, and the first real invoice arrives with every one of those decisions on it. Credits make it easy to spend without looking. The fix is simple: look now, while you still have time to change things without pressure.

This guide gives you a plan for 60, 30 and 7 days before the end date, and a way to estimate the first real bill today.

Step zero: find your end date and balance

AWS. Open Billing and Cost Management, then Credits. The table shows each credit's Amount remaining, Expiration date and Applicable products (the services it can pay for). Click a credit for its details. Note that the Amount remaining column updates at the end of each billing cycle; for this month's estimate, open Bills and the Savings tab, or check Estimated amount remaining on the credit's detail page.

Google Cloud. Open Billing, choose your billing account, then Credits. The table lists each credit's remaining and original value, start and end dates, and scope (whether it only covers certain services).

Two things to write down:

The earlier of two dates: the expiration date, or the day the balance hits zero at your current burn rate. Divide the remaining balance by your average monthly spend to estimate the second.
What the credits do not cover. Check the applicable services list. Some charges, such as certain marketplace purchases or support plans, may never have been covered, and you may already be paying them.

How to estimate your first real bill

You want the cost of your usage before credits are applied.

AWS Cost Explorer:

Billing and Cost Management, then Cost Explorer.
Date range: the last 3 full months, granularity Monthly.
In the filters panel, open Charge type and exclude Credit (and Refund). What is left is roughly what you would have paid.
Group by Service to see where it goes.
Look at the forecast for the current month with the same filter.

Google Cloud: open Billing, then Reports. In the filter panel, untick the credit types under Credits so the chart shows cost before credits. Group by Service.

Example (illustrative numbers, not a real client): a team sees $0 invoices, but usage before credits is $6,200 a month, rising about 8% a month. Three months from now, with no changes, the first real bill would be around $7,800. That number, not $0, is what to plan around.

Also check:

Growth trend. Is usage before credits rising faster than customers or revenue?
Annual or upfront charges that land in one month, such as domain renewals or one-time purchases.
Taxes, which credits may not cover depending on your location and the program terms.

60 days before: find what the credits were hiding

This is the window for real cleanup, because some fixes need a maintenance window or a code change.

Run the 5-line bill check. Data transfer, NAT gateways, idle databases, old snapshots and logs kept forever are where unused spend usually hides. Our 10-minute AWS bill check walks through each one.
List every running resource and give each an owner. In AWS, Resource Groups & Tag Editor can search all regions at once. Anything with no owner is a candidate to stop.
Check every region. Test resources in a region nobody uses day to day are common and easy to miss.
Right-size the big items. For each of your 5 most expensive resources, check average use over 30 days (CPU, memory, connections). A database averaging under 10% CPU can often drop one or two sizes.
Shut down test and staging outside work hours, or delete environments that nobody has used in a month.
Ask about new programs. Some cloud providers and partners run further credit programs for startups at later stages. Ask your account contact what you may still qualify for, before the end date.

30 days before: set guardrails and commit carefully

Create a budget with alerts. In AWS, Billing and Cost Management, then Budgets: set a monthly cost budget at your expected post-credit spend with email alerts at 50%, 80% and 100%. In Google Cloud, Billing, then Budgets & alerts. Budgets alert you; they do not stop spending.
Turn on anomaly alerts. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection flags a sudden jump on one service, which catches leaked keys and runaway jobs quickly.
Make sure the payment method works. Confirm the card or invoice setup on the billing account and who receives billing emails. An expired card on the first paid month is an avoidable outage risk.
Consider commitments only after cleanup. AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, and Google Cloud committed use discounts, lower the price in exchange for a 1 or 3 year commitment. Size them to your lowest steady month after cleanup, never to today's usage. Committing to waste locks it in.
Tag what is left by product or environment, so the first real bill can be read line by line.

7 days before: final checks

Re-ran the estimate: usage before credits for the current month
Budget alerts are on and go to someone who reads them
Payment method confirmed, billing contact correct
Every remaining resource has an owner
No test or staging environment left running without a reason
Team told the expected first bill, so nobody is surprised
Calendar reminder for the day the first invoice arrives, to compare it with your estimate

The printable checklist

After the first real bill

Compare the invoice with your estimate. If it is more than 10 to 15% higher, group by usage type in Cost Explorer and find the line that moved. The first two or three paid months are when a cleanup pays off the most.

Not sure where you stand? The 2-minute check covers credits, surprise bills and renewals, and gives you one fix for each gap.

Free AWS bill check

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The free review reads three months of your bill with view-only access, shows what the credits were hiding, and lists the 3 fixes worth doing first in dollars per month. You can do every fix yourself.

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