Cost Optimization
AWS cost optimization that actually sticks: find the waste fast, then build the practice that keeps it from coming back. We deliver concrete savings with dollar estimates — not another dashboard.
The state of most AWS bills
- 10–30% of spend is waste — idle, oversized, or orphaned resources
- No clear owner per dollar — engineering and finance disagree on who's accountable
- Tagging is partial — chargeback and showback are not possible
- Savings Plans and RI coverage is ad-hoc — over- or under-committed
- Surprise bills — anomalies caught after the month closes, not before
- No monthly review cadence — cost work happens reactively after a leadership ask
What "sticks" means
A one-time sweep finds savings. A practice keeps them. We do both — the audit gets the dollars back this quarter, and the FinOps process keeps the bill flat as the business grows.
No vendor lock-in. The tagging policy, anomaly alerts, and review cadence all live in your AWS account and your tools. We hand it off cleanly.
Concrete deliverables, not advice
- Cost & Usage Report (CUR) analysis — line-by-line, with Athena queries you keep
- Right-sizing across EC2, RDS, EBS, and Lambda — with utilization data, not guesses
- Savings Plans and Reserved Instance strategy — with commitment math you can defend
- Tagging strategy and chargeback/showback model — enforced via SCPs and Config rules
- AWS Cost Anomaly Detection + CloudWatch alerting — wired to Slack or email
- FinOps process design — cadence, roles, and a monthly review template
Five steps from waste to practice
Baseline
CUR analysis, account inventory, and a tagging audit. We build a complete picture of where every dollar goes before recommending anything.
Quick Wins
Idle resources, oversized instances, orphaned EBS volumes, unattached EIPs. Findings ranked by dollar value and effort to fix.
Commitment Strategy
Savings Plans and RI recommendations with break-even math. We model commitment scenarios against your real usage, not vendor defaults.
Guardrails
Tagging policy, anomaly detection, budget alerts, and chargeback model. The infrastructure that catches the next surprise before it lands.
Practice Handoff
Monthly review template, FinOps roles, and the cadence to keep it running. We document everything and train the team that owns it next.
What you walk away with
- A ranked savings backlog with dollar estimates per item — not a percentage
- A defensible Savings Plan commitment recommendation with break-even modeling
- A tagging policy and chargeback/showback model your finance team can use
- Cost anomaly alerting wired to where your engineers actually look
- A monthly FinOps review cadence — agenda, attendees, and the dashboard to drive it
Ready to see where the money goes?
No commitment required. We'll scope the engagement over a 30-minute call and give you a clear proposal within 48 hours.
Start a Cost ReviewFrequently asked questions
How much can we actually save?
Most environments we look at carry 10–30% waste — idle resources, oversizing, missing commitment coverage. The honest answer for your bill requires the CUR analysis, which is the first step and produces a ranked backlog with a dollar estimate per item, so you know the answer before committing to any remediation.
Will the savings stick, or will the bill creep back up?
One-time sweeps decay; that is why the engagement ships a practice, not just findings — tagging enforcement, anomaly alerts, budget guardrails, and a monthly review cadence your team owns. The mechanism that catches the next surprise is part of the deliverable.
What access do you need?
Read-only: the Cost & Usage Report, Cost Explorer, and CloudWatch utilization metrics. No production changes are made during analysis — remediation happens later, as explicit, prioritized changes your team approves.
Savings Plans or Reserved Instances?
Usually Compute Savings Plans for flexibility, with RIs where the workload is truly static (some RDS and ElastiCache cases). The recommendation comes with break-even math against your actual usage history — never a blanket coverage percentage.
Will right-sizing hurt performance?
Right-sizing decisions come from utilization data over a real observation window, not from a spreadsheet heuristic — and changes ship with the same rollback discipline as everything else we do. Cost and reliability are reviewed together; that is the point of the Well-Architected lens.
What does it cost?
Fixed price, scoped in one call based on account count and spend. The ranked savings backlog usually pays for the engagement many times over — and you see the estimate per item before spending anything on remediation.
Related: Well-Architected Review · AWS Migration · Operate & Optimize