What should dev, UAT, and production actually cost?

Most products we audit run three environments: dev, UAT, and production. Almost all of them overspend on the first two.

Dev and UAT do not need production-grade databases, multi-AZ redundancy, or always-on instances. A $20 VPS or scale-to-zero setup covers most teams' staging needs.

Production is where you spend: managed Postgres with backups, monitoring, and enough headroom for traffic spikes. We publish per-environment costs to our clients monthly — if you cannot explain your cloud bill line by line, that is the first fix.