Cloud Cost & Efficiency Assessment
Find out how much of your cloud bill is unnecessary.
A focused review of your AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud environment that identifies unnecessary spending, quantifies what it costs you annually, and sets out exactly what it takes to capture it.
Book a Cloud Cost Assessment- Fixed scope, typically two to four weeks
- Read-only access, under your NDA
- Vendor-neutral, no cloud reselling or commissions
- No obligation to implement anything
What it answers
Three questions, answered with your own data.
How much of our cloud bill is unnecessary?
Not an industry benchmark applied to your invoice — a number derived from your own utilization, commitment coverage, and architecture, with the reasoning attached to each line.
What would it take to remove it?
Every finding carries the implementation effort, the dependencies, the risk, and the team that would own it — so the plan can be scheduled rather than debated.
What is safe to change, and what is not?
Some of what looks like waste is deliberate headroom, a compliance requirement, or load-bearing redundancy. The assessment separates the two rather than handing you a list to find out the hard way.
What we analyze
Every place a cloud bill leaks.
Area by area, separating spend that tracks the business from spend that is simply unmanaged.
Compute & rightsizing
Instance families and sizes against real utilization, autoscaling behavior, generation upgrades, and schedules for environments that do not need to run around the clock.
Commitments & reserved capacity
Savings Plan, Reserved Instance, and Committed Use Discount coverage, utilization, term mix, and expiries — including commitments bought for workloads that have since changed.
Kubernetes efficiency
Requests and limits against actual consumption, bin packing, node group and instance selection, cluster autoscaling, and capacity that is paid for but never scheduled.
Storage
Tiering and lifecycle policy, snapshot and backup sprawl, redundancy choices, request patterns, and volumes that outlived whatever they were attached to.
Databases
Instance sizing and engine edition, provisioned storage and IOPS, replica topology, backup retention, and managed-service tiers chosen at launch and never revisited.
Networking & data transfer
Cross-zone and cross-region traffic, NAT gateway processing, internet egress, load balancer topology, and private connectivity options that cost less than the path in use.
Logging & observability
Ingestion volume, retention tiers, metric cardinality, sampling strategy, and overlapping tooling that bills you twice for the same signal.
Idle & orphaned resources
Unattached disks, unused addresses and load balancers, stale environments, abandoned accounts and subscriptions, and resources no current team recognizes.
Architecture inefficiency
Design patterns that make spend scale faster than usage or revenue — chatty services, oversized redundancy, and the wrong service for the workload.
Governance & FinOps practice
Tagging and cost allocation, showback and accountability, budgets and anomaly alerting, and who is actually responsible for the bill between finance and engineering.
AI & GPU infrastructure
GPU utilization between training runs, inference sizing and batching, model and API spend, and accelerator choices that cost more than the workload requires.
How it works
A short, fixed-scope engagement with a defined end date.
The assessment typically runs two to four weeks and stops when it is done. Steps four and five happen only if you want them to.
Discovery
60 minutesA short call to understand your environment, what is driving spend growth, and what you need the outcome to be.
Assessment
Read-only accessWe analyze billing data, commitment coverage, and the architecture behind the largest line items.
Findings
Your deliverablePrioritized recommendations with estimated annual impact, effort, and risk for each — plus a stakeholder readout.
Optimization
OptionalWe implement the recommendations alongside your team, through your change process.
Continuous FinOps
OptionalWe stay on to run the ongoing practice — optimization cycles, commitments, forecasting, and reporting.
What you get
A costed, prioritized plan you can execute.
The assessment ends with something an engineering team can execute and a finance team can budget against.
Prioritized findings register
Every opportunity, with annual impact, effort, risk, and owner — sorted so the sequence is obvious.
Quantified savings opportunity
The total reduction available, split into configuration changes and architectural work.
Implementation plan
What to execute in what order, how to validate it, and how to roll it back.
Executive readout
A working session on the findings, the trade-offs, and the decisions that need a person.
Example opportunities
The kinds of savings an assessment looks for.
Which apply, and what each is worth, is what the assessment establishes.
Environments that run when nobody is using them
Dev, staging, and QA billed 168 hours a week for a team that works 40.
Capacity provisioned for a peak that never arrives
Sized against a worst case the workload has never approached, and never resized since.
Commitment coverage that no longer matches the workload
Steady usage at on-demand rates, beside commitments paid for workloads that moved or shrank.
Kubernetes requests set far above real consumption
Requests copied from a template and never measured, holding nodes at a fraction of capacity.
Storage left in the tier it was created in
Data in the hottest tier long after anyone reads it, with no lifecycle policy behind it.
Snapshots and volumes that outlived their workload
Backups with no retention limit, disks detached from instances that were terminated.
Data taking the expensive path
Traffic crossing zones, regions, and NAT gateways where a private endpoint costs a fraction.
Observability billed at full fidelity forever
Debug logs retained for years, and two vendors ingesting the same telemetry.
Managed service tiers chosen once and inherited
Editions, IOPS, and replicas chosen at launch and carried unexamined ever since.
Spend no team recognizes as theirs
Untagged resources that survive every budget review precisely because no one owns them.
Who it is for
Worth doing when the numbers are worth it.
Optimization work has to pay for itself several times over. These are the signals that it will.
- Monthly cloud spend large enough that a percentage of it is a number your CFO cares about
- Spend growing faster than usage, revenue, or headcount
- A bill that is hard to allocate to teams, products, or customers
- An upcoming commitment renewal, budget cycle, or cost-reduction target
- A platform team that knows there is waste but has no room on the roadmap to chase it
- Recent or planned growth in AI, GPU, or data-intensive workloads
Who we usually work with
- CTO / CIO
- VP Engineering
- VP Infrastructure
- Head of Platform
- Head of Cloud
- CFO / Finance leadership
- FinOps leadership
If your environment is too small for the engagement to pay for itself, we will say so on the first call rather than sell you an assessment.
Scope and output
What the assessment actually produces.
The mechanics of the engagement — duration, deliverables, and how the numbers are arrived at.
Next step
Get the number before you plan around it.
Book a Cloud Cost Assessment and start with a 60-minute discovery call. If the opportunity is not there, you will hear that first.
No obligation, no cloud reselling, no commission from any vendor.