Cloud costs
The bill goes up every quarter. Revenue doesn't.
To reduce cloud costs for good, read the AWS, GCP or Azure bill against the architecture, the code and the traffic, cut what nobody owns, and give every remaining line a named owner: a fixed-price platform cost review does that in 1 to 2 weeks.
Nobody in the building can say which part of the bill buys anything. That is not a pricing problem, and a reserved-instances exercise will not fix it. It is an ownership problem.
Where the money actually goes
In every review the pattern is the same. The bill is not one big mistake. It is a dozen small decisions that nobody revisited after the person who made them moved on.
- Environments nobody switched off. Staging, demo and load-test setups from a launch that is long over, running 24 hours a day.
- Capacity for traffic that never came. Clusters at 20 percent utilisation, because nobody dares to change the node sizes.
- Data kept forever. Snapshots, logs and backups of backups, with retention set to "never" by default.
- Debt that bills every month. A pipeline that stores every intermediate result 3 times, built in a hurry and owned by nobody since its author left.
- Sprawl. A managed service per team for the same job, and data moving between regions because of a decision from 2 teams ago.
It is ownership debt wearing a cost hat. Reducing AWS costs is an ownership problem works through the pattern in detail, and your cloud bill doubled and nobody can say why covers the version where it happened in a year.
Who this is for
Founders, CEOs, CFOs and owners of companies where the cloud bill has become a line the business notices. Two kinds call. Scale-ups with 15 to 120 engineers, where the bill grows faster than revenue. And owner-led companies in Belgium and the Netherlands with a platform built by a small team or an agency, where the hosting invoice comes from a supplier nobody in the building can check.
- The bill grew faster than revenue for 2 quarters or more.
- Someone asked what each line buys, and nobody could answer.
- Savings plans or reserved instances were bought, and the curve did not move.
- The engineer who designed the setup has left.
Who it is not for
- Your whole cloud bill is smaller than the review would cost. Use the vendor's free tools and keep the money.
- You want someone paid as a percentage of the saving. I don't work that way, for reasons further down.
- You have already decided to migrate to another cloud and want the decision blessed.
- You want an outsider making changes in your accounts. Your engineers change things; I decide with you what changes.
When people call
- The bill doubled in a year and the traffic did not.
- The accountant or the CFO flagged hosting as the fastest-growing cost line.
- The lead engineer or the agency that built the platform is leaving, and nobody else knows what runs where.
- A hosting or maintenance contract with an agency is up for renewal, and there is no basis for negotiating it.
- A buyer, a bank or a board is asking about gross margin, and cloud spend is the line that spoils it.
How the platform cost review runs
Fixed price, quoted on the call and agreed before the work starts. 1 to 2 weeks, depending on how many accounts and products there are. Read-only access is enough: the billing export, the cost explorer, the infrastructure code, and the repositories.
| When | Work |
|---|---|
| Before day 1 | A 15-minute call, a written scope, then read-only access. Nothing is changed in your accounts. |
| Days 1 to 3 | The bill broken down by service, account, environment and tag. The 20 largest lines named. Untagged spend made visible, which is often where the surprises are. |
| Days 4 to 7 | Each large line read against the architecture and the real traffic. Short interviews with the engineers who own, or used to own, each part. Code read where the bill points at it. |
| Week 2 | The written report, then a working session to walk you and the team through it. |
The report has 3 lists. What is waste and goes now, usually within weeks and without risk. What is the monthly price of technical debt, each item with what it costs to leave and what it costs to fix. And what the business genuinely needs to keep paying for at today's traffic. Every line gets a proposed owner and a place in the sequence.
After the review
Your engineers do the work. In most reviews the missing piece was not skill but a mandate, a sequence, and someone senior enough to decide what could be switched off. If you want that held, I stay on at about 1 day a week for a few months while the sequence runs. Plenty of companies execute the report themselves.
How it ends
The handover is a named owner for each of the 10 largest cost lines, budget alerts that reach a person instead of a shared inbox, and a 30-minute monthly cost review on someone's calendar. That habit is what keeps the bill down after I leave. Without it, the bill drifts back within a year.
What it costs
The review is a fixed price, quoted on the call once I know how many accounts and products are involved. Any follow-on time is billed at day rates in the normal Western European band of EUR 1 000 to EUR 1 600, invoiced monthly. No equity, no success fee, and no cut of the saving.
The last one is deliberate. A reviewer paid a percentage of the saving is paid to cut, not to tell you which spend is worth keeping. Part of every bill is the business working, and the report has to be free to say so. The fee is sized so the saving covers it within a few months. If I don't think it will, I say that on the call.
What it has produced
Cloud bill down 42 percent: a scale-up on AWS, the bill rising faster than revenue. From EUR 74 000 to EUR 43 000 a month in 5 months, no layoffs, no re-platforming. Most of the saving sat in things nobody had owned for over a year: 3 full environments for a product line that had been sold, clusters running at 20 percent, logs kept forever.
The same lens works on supplier bills. At an owner-led SME, the portal shipped in 11 weeks, with EUR 180 000 a year off the agency bill once the contract paid for outcomes instead of capacity. Not a cloud bill, but the same problem: a cost line nobody in the building could check.
A cost review, a FinOps tool, or your cloud vendor's advice
All three have a place. They answer different questions.
| Option | What it does well | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|
| A FinOps tool | Visibility: dashboards, tagging reports, anomaly alerts, forecasts. Useful once someone owns the lines. | It shows the bill in more detail. It does not read the code, decide what can go, or make anyone own a line. |
| The vendor's own optimisation | Rightsizing hints, commitment discounts, a partner's free architecture review. Cheap, and worth running. | It lowers the price of what you run, not whether you should run it. A 3-year commitment on waste locks the waste in. |
| A platform cost review | The spend read against the architecture, the code and the traffic. Waste, debt and real cost separated, with an owner per line. | It is a point in time. Keeping the bill down is the owners' job afterwards, which is why the handover is built around them. |
The order that works: review first, then commit on what is left, then add a tool if the bill is big enough to need one.
AWS cost optimisation in Belgium and the Netherlands
Most of the companies I see run on AWS, a smaller share on Azure or GCP. The method is the same on all three. In Belgium and the Netherlands the bill often arrives through a reseller or the agency that built the platform, sometimes with the account in the supplier's name. Part of the review is getting the account, the access and the invoice back in your own name, so whoever owns a line can see what it costs. The work runs in Dutch or English, remote-first, with days on site when that helps.
Related: technical debt, priced per month for the part of the bill that is debt, the fractional CTO for SMEs for owner-led companies, and platform cost and technical debt on the overview of services. When the bill is one symptom of a wider engineering problem, start with the 3-week diagnosis instead. Technical debt has a monthly cost explains how debt shows up on the bill.
Put a number on it first: the engineering cost calculator
Frequently asked
How do I reduce my cloud costs?
Read the bill against the architecture, the code and the traffic, switch off what nobody owns, put a monthly price on the technical debt, and give every remaining line a named owner. Commitment discounts come after that, not before. A platform cost review does the reading in 1 to 2 weeks and puts the result in writing.
How much can a cloud cost review save?
There is no honest number before the review. In the reviews I've done, a large share of the bill was usually waste or the price of debt rather than the cost of running the business. The engagement written up as a case study went from EUR 74 000 to EUR 43 000 a month in 5 months, without layoffs or re-platforming.
How long does a platform cost review take?
1 to 2 weeks, depending on how many accounts and products there are. It needs read-only access to billing, the cost explorer and the repositories, plus short interviews with the engineers who own each part. It ends with a written report and a walkthrough session.
What does a cloud cost review cost?
A fixed price, quoted on the intro call once the scope is clear. No percentage of the saving, no success fee, no equity. A reviewer paid on the saving is paid to cut, not to tell you which spend is worth keeping.
Should I buy savings plans or reserved instances first?
No. Commitment discounts lower the price of what you run, including the waste, and lock it in for 1 to 3 years. Cut first, then commit on what remains. In the case study, finance had negotiated a savings plan twice and the curve did not move.
Will a cost review lead to layoffs or a cloud migration?
Usually neither. The case study needed no layoffs and no re-platforming: the existing engineers did the work once they had a mandate and a sequence. Moving to another cloud is rarely what the bill asks for, and the report says so when it is.
Do you work on AWS, Azure and GCP?
Yes. Most of the work is on AWS, some on Azure and GCP, and the method does not change: the bill read against the architecture and the traffic. Hosting bundled into an agency contract gets the same treatment.