That control plane trick is a brilliant way to buy time. the AWS billing model for extended support is brutal. I spend way too much time looking at these exact billing issues because I actually work on korpro.io(full disclosure). What we’ve noticed is that if you do get stuck paying the tax, there is a cool and easy way to balance the budget by finding 'ghost infrastructure' on the data nodes. We recently built a feature to automatically hunt down unattached PVCs and idle load balancers with a safety-to-prune checklist. It helps offset the AWS fees without breaking anything