Cloud costs
The bill goes up every quarter. Revenue doesn't.
Nobody in the building can say which part of the AWS, GCP or Azure bill buys anything. That is not a pricing problem, and a reserved-instances exercise will not fix it.
Where the money actually goes
In every review the pattern is the same: environments nobody switched off, services scaled for traffic that never came, data stored three times because deleting felt risky, and architecture decisions from two teams ago that bill every month. It is ownership debt wearing a cost hat. Reducing AWS costs is an ownership problem works through the pattern in detail.
How the review runs
A fixed fee, agreed up front. I read the spend against the architecture, the code, and the traffic, then put three lists in writing: what is waste and goes now, what is the monthly price of technical debt and gets a plan, and what the business genuinely needs to keep paying for. Then each remaining line gets an owner, which is the part that keeps the bill down after I leave.
What it has produced
Cloud bill down 42 percent: from EUR 74 000 to EUR 43 000 a month in 5 months. No layoffs, no re-platforming, no credits negotiation. Most of the saving sat in things nobody had owned for over a year.