Stopping AWS RDS Instance to avoid payment

Question

I set up a non-free tier instance and I was billed with an enormous amount of money even though I've been using a local database for my development.  should I completely delete it or just stopping the instance would suffice for the billing meter to stop ticking?

Answer 1

If you stop the instance the cost will go down significantly, but the charges will still be there for the storage. To fully reduce the charges you have to terminate the DB instance and check if you have any existing manual backups or snapshots of it.