Refine Blog
Practical AWS cost & security guides
Anchor posts on the patterns that move the needle, plus a working archive of older guides. Written by the engineers building Refine.
Anchor posts
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Refine Plans Are Live — What “Launching Soon” Actually Meant
Growth, Scale and Enterprise are assignable today — the badge was on the wrong noun. Self-serve checkout is what's still in build. Here's that correction, and what shipped alongside it.
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Refine Pricing Is Here: Free, Growth, Scale, and Enterprise
We designed pricing the way we design the product: one visible number decides your plan, flat prices, and a free tier that stays genuinely useful.
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Connect AWS to Refine in Minutes with CloudFormation Quick-Create
One click now stands up everything Refine needs — a FOCUS 1.2 billing export and a read-only IAM role only Refine can assume. No access keys.
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Product Update: The Refine Dashboard Is Now 3× Faster
Login-to-dashboard dropped from 12.5 seconds to under 4, API calls fell from 146 to 28 — and every screen now agrees on the same numbers.
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AWS Cost Anomalies: Catching Them Before They Compound
Why threshold alerts miss the anomalies that matter, and what statistical baselines + AI commentary do differently.
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S3 Storage Class Tuning Without Breaking Apps
How to move cold S3 data to cheaper tiers without paying retrieval surprises or breaking the apps reading from it.
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EC2 Right-Sizing 101
A practical guide to right-sizing EC2 instances without breaking workloads — what to measure, what to ignore, and how to roll back.
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Tag Governance: A FinOps Foundation
Why tag governance is the foundation every other FinOps practice depends on, and how to get to mature tagging without a rebuild.
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Security Findings That Quietly Cost You Money
The security misconfigurations that don't get audited but slowly drain budget — and how to spot them in your AWS account.
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More from the Archive
Optimizing AWS Costs: Best Practices for 2024
Learn essential strategies for reducing your AWS spend while maintaining performance.
Read articleTop AWS Cost Management Tools to Watch
A curated list of tools that help businesses track and reduce AWS expenses.
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Reducing EC2 Costs with Right-Sizing
Learn how to select the right EC2 instance types to match workloads and save money.
Read articleLeverage Spot Instances for Massive Savings
Spot Instances can cut compute costs dramatically. Learn how to integrate them safely.
Read articleCutting Storage Costs with S3 Optimization
Practical techniques to reduce Amazon S3 expenses while maintaining data availability.
Read articleServerless Cost Optimization Strategies
Learn how to control spending when running serverless workloads on AWS.
Read articleCloud FinOps for Small Business
A guide to implementing financial operations practices on AWS without a dedicated team.
Read articleUsing AWS Billing Data for Insights
Turn raw Cost and Usage Reports into actionable intelligence for your business.
Read articleHow Refine Helps Optimize AWS Costs
An overview of Refine’s features and how they contribute to cost savings on AWS.
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