I have definitely looked into getting the costs down, we’re not doing anything truly special.
Making use of best practice costs a lot more than most people expect, interzonal networking is charged, for example; a lot of people also assume that redundancies are built in to things like RDS or CloudSQL, but they’re not, and you should be having replicas.
And of course traffic to databases is interzonal networking.
It adds up, not a lot can be done In Many cases.