Cloud cost reviews are among our most common engagements. Bills often grow a few percent a month as teams add services, storage, and capacity without reviewing what remains in use.
We have reviewed environments spending two thousand a month and environments spending far more. We begin with compute, storage, data transfer, pricing commitments, and unused environments.
Compute capacity and usage
Instances may remain sized for a launch peak long after traffic drops. An autoscaling group can still hold that capacity eighteen months later. Compare its capacity with recent usage before choosing smaller instances or adjusting scaling limits.
Storage retention
S3 buckets, EBS snapshots, and CloudWatch logs can keep accumulating data unless retention rules remove it. We find snapshot chains going back years, attached to machine images nobody can name. Lifecycle policies can remove or archive data according to its retention requirements.
Data transfer charges
NAT gateways charge per gigabyte processed. Cross-zone traffic charges in both directions. Service-to-service traffic can be difficult to trace without a detailed Cost and Usage Report. It is common to find NAT processing fees rivaling the cost of the compute behind them.
Paying list price for predictable workloads
A database that has run every hour for three years qualifies as predictable, and if your commitment coverage sits near zero, you are paying full price for capacity you were always going to use.
Unused environments
Staging clusters, proof-of-concept projects, and old load test environments may keep running after a project ends. Low utilization can make them easy to overlook, but they continue to incur charges. Tag resources with an owner and a purpose. Review unassigned resources to identify which are no longer needed.
Choosing a hosting environment
For workloads with predictable demand, compare cloud and flat-rate hosting costs. A steady internal application with no burst pattern can run on flat-rate hosting for a fraction of the price. We operate our own hosting infrastructure for exactly these cases, and we move workloads there when the numbers support it.
Where to start
Pull the last three invoices and sort by service. For the top five services, compare what you pay for with the capacity and features you use.
Our reviews are read-only and fixed-fee, and clients typically finish with cloud costs 20 to 50 percent lower.