AWS cost optimization that does not break anything.
A fixed-fee, two-week AWS cost audit that finds the spend buying you nothing, ranks every finding by dollar impact, effort and risk, and tells you what to do first. Typical result: 25 to 40% off the bill. If we do not find at least $5,000 in annual savings, you do not pay.
Recent engagement, B2B SaaS with real-time data-intensive workloads. Zero downtime, zero failed migrations. Full case study available on request.
Why AWS bills grow faster than the business
Nobody sets out to waste money on AWS. It accumulates. A test environment is created for a launch and never switched off. An instance is sized for a traffic spike that happened once. Snapshots pile up because deleting one feels risky. Logs are kept forever because nobody set a retention period. Each decision was reasonable at the time, and each one keeps billing every hour.
The result is a bill that climbs every quarter in a way nobody on the team can fully explain, and an engineering team with no time to go looking, because they are busy shipping the product. That is the gap a cost audit closes.
Where the money usually goes
Every account is different, but the same handful of causes turn up in almost every audit.
Idle non-production
Development, staging and QA environments running 24/7 when they are used during working hours. Often 10 to 20% of the bill, and scheduling them off carries no customer risk at all.
Oversized and older instances
EC2 and RDS sized for a peak that never came back, or still on previous generations that cost more for less. Right-sizing against real CloudWatch metrics is quiet, steady money.
Storage nobody owns
Unattached EBS volumes, years of snapshots, gp2 volumes that would be cheaper as gp3, and S3 buckets with no lifecycle rules. Commonly 5 to 10% of the bill.
Data transfer and NAT
Traffic to S3 flowing through a NAT gateway instead of a free gateway endpoint, chatty cross-zone traffic, and replication nobody set up on purpose.
Commitments bought wrong
No Savings Plans at all on a steady workload, or Reserved Instances bought for instances that were later resized, so the discount no longer applies to anything.
Old engines and backups
Database engines past standard support, which AWS now bills extra for, and third-party backup products doing what AWS Backup does natively for a fraction of the cost.
How the two-week audit works
- Day 0, kickoff. A 30-minute call to agree scope and access. You deploy a read-only IAM role from the CloudFormation template we provide.
- Days 1 to 5, analysis. Cost Explorer and billing data, CloudWatch utilization, configuration review, an inventory of compute and storage, and a map of how the architecture fits together.
- Days 6 to 8, report. A 25 to 40 page report: executive summary, current state, findings ranked, a 30/60/90-day roadmap, reliability and security flags, next steps.
- Day 9, internal QA. Every dollar figure and risk rating is checked again before it reaches you.
- Day 10, findings review. A 90-minute call walking your leadership team through every finding.
- Days 13 to 15, follow-up. We talk through the roadmap, and whether you want help carrying it out.
What you get
- Every finding with its annual dollar saving, the effort to capture it, and a risk rating
- A 30/60/90-day implementation roadmap, quick wins first
- A Savings Plan and Reserved Instance recommendation sized to your cleaned-up baseline
- Reliability, security and architecture issues we noticed along the way, flagged separately
- A report written for engineering managers and CTOs, specific enough for your engineers to act on
- A $5,000 savings guarantee: if we do not find it, you do not pay
Cost optimization is not the same as cutting corners
The easiest way to shrink an AWS bill is to remove redundancy, and it is also the easiest way to cause an outage. We do not do that. Every recommendation carries a risk rating, and anything that could touch a customer experience is marked as such, with the safer alternative next to it.
We have run production systems on AWS ourselves, including the parts that break at 3am. The goal is a bill that reflects the business you actually run, with the same reliability you have today or better.
If the audit turns up bigger structural problems, such as an architecture that no longer fits or a database that should be managed rather than self-hosted, we say so. Those often become migration or architecture work, and they tend to save more than the quick wins.
Who this is for
Engineering teams running production workloads on AWS, typically spending between $15K and $100K a month, without a dedicated AWS specialist on staff. B2B SaaS companies are our home ground, but the same waste shows up in every industry. We work with teams in Canada, the United States and Europe, remotely.
Frequently asked questions
How much can an AWS cost audit save?
Most environments we review can cut 25 to 40% of the monthly bill without touching what customers see. The exact figure depends on how the account grew. If the audit does not find at least $5,000 in annual savings, you do not pay for it.
Do you need access to our production environment?
No. You deploy a read-only IAM role from a CloudFormation template we provide. We can see configuration, metrics and billing data. We cannot change anything, and you can remove the role the moment the audit ends.
How long does the audit take, and how much of our time does it need?
Two weeks from kickoff to findings review. Your team spends about 30 minutes on the kickoff call, a few minutes deploying the role, and 90 minutes on the findings review. Everything in between is our work.
What does the audit cost?
A fixed fee, agreed before we start and based on the size of your environment. No hourly billing. And if the audit does not find at least $5,000 in annual savings, you do not pay.
Will you implement the savings, or just tell us about them?
Either. Many teams implement the quick wins themselves from the report, which is written so they can. For the larger changes, we can do the work as a fixed-price project or as part of a fractional AWS engineering retainer.
Should we just buy Savings Plans first?
Usually not first. A commitment locks in whatever you are running today, including the waste. Right-size and clean up, then commit to the smaller, steadier baseline that is left. The audit tells you what that baseline is and which commitment fits it.
Related services
Find out what your bill is hiding
Fifteen minutes on a call is enough to tell whether an audit is worth it for you. If it is not, we will say so.