AWS sent me a bill of $500 (over Ksh 65,000) for a server instance doing nothing. I was on holiday. The server was idle. The meter never stopped.

This 10-minute lightning talk has no slides, no fluff, and no sales pitch. Just one sharp insight: cost is a technical specification, not a finance problem. You will walk away with one concrete action you can implement tonight – setting up AWS Budget alerts in under 2 minutes. You'll also learn why 'stop' does not mean 'delete', how to survive the Free Tier, and the controversial opinion that free startup credits actually make us lazy builders.

This is a survival guide for every student, developer, or startup founder in Kenya who wants to experiment without going broke.