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How It Works
When you take a snapshot of an EBS volume, AWS captures the state of the volume at that moment and stores the data in Amazon S3 in your account’s region. The first snapshot copies all data on the volume. Each subsequent snapshot is incremental, meaning it stores only the blocks that changed since the last snapshot. Despite being incremental, every snapshot is self-contained for restore purposes: AWS tracks the full chain internally so you can restore from any single snapshot without needing the others. Snapshots can be created manually, on a schedule using AWS Data Lifecycle Manager, or triggered automatically by services like AWS Backup. See EBS Snapshot Cost and ELB Pricing: What You Are Actually Paying For.
Why It Matters for Cloud Cost
Snapshots are billed by the gigabytes stored per month, and costs compound quietly. Teams often create snapshots for a launch, a migration, or a compliance requirement and then forget them. Over time, hundreds of outdated snapshots accumulate across accounts and regions, each continuing to incur storage charges. Because each snapshot appears to be incremental and small, the individual cost looks trivial. The aggregate, however, can reach thousands of dollars per month in mature AWS environments. The root problem is that snapshots have no automatic expiration. Without a defined retention policy and a process to enforce it, orphaned snapshots become a persistent source of waste. Identifying and deleting snapshots tied to terminated instances or decommissioned volumes is one of the most accessible cloud cost reduction actions available.
ClearCost provides cost visibility and showback reporting across your AWS environment, giving finance and engineering teams the account-level data needed to understand where cloud spend is going.