Cloud cost review · Assessment
Why your cloud bill went up, line by line
If the bill grows faster than traffic, a two-week review shows which lines you can cut. One national identity system went from $24,000 to $2,000 a month.
FormatWritten assessment
Timeline2 weeks
PricingFixed-price assessment · hourly work
Proof2 case studies
The assessment in 4 parts
01 · Signs you need it
If two of these apply, this is a good fit.
- The bill grows faster than traffic, and nobody knows which line is behind it
- Someone said you should move to serverless, or off it, and you have no way to check
- You pay for a managed service and aren’t sure it’s cheaper than running your own instance
- The last time anyone read the bill was when you chose the region
- Uploads go through your backend, and the instance grew to carry them
02 · What you get
Two weeks after we get read access to the account and the code, you get a document with:
- The bill broken down by meter. AWS reports what you spent on each service, such as EC2. The breakdown shows what you spent on storage, access, traffic and compute, which are different problems with different fixes.
- Every cause we find, sorted into one of three kinds: capacity that was sized wrong, something that is broken, or something that was built wrong. Each kind is found differently and fixed differently.
- The fixes worth making, each with the amount it saves, in order of savings against effort.
- What isn’t worth fixing, and why. This is usually half the document.
03 · How we decide
STEP 01We start by splitting the bill by meter.Each meter is then compared with what the system uses. On a government identity system in West Africa, this showed instances and a database that had been sized generously at launch, when nobody knew the load, and never revisited.
STEP 02Next, we look for cost that doesn’t follow traffic.If compute stays flat overnight while traffic falls to zero, something is running for no one. On the same system it was infinite loops, billed every month without raising a single error.
STEP 03Then we read the code.Architectural causes don’t show on any dashboard. In the identity system, every photo of a face or a document passed through the backend on its way to storage, so the instances had to be sized for the uploads. This kind is found last and is usually the largest.
STEP 04Last, we test whether you should stay or move.Take the largest meter and ask whether you can halve it without breaking what you sell. If you can, fix it and stay. If you can’t, the pricing model works against your business and will cost more every month you grow.
04 · If we find nothing
If the bill is reasonable for what the system does, the document shows that meter by meter. The next time someone asks why the cloud costs what it does, you have the answer in writing.
Proof
Where we’ve done this before
Case study 14 · Data$24k → $2kA national identity system in West Africa had all three kinds of cause, and none of them had produced an error. Within six months its monthly bill went from $24,000 to $2,000, for the same users doing the same work. Against what the workload needed, the bill had been about eight times too large; the final cut was twelvefold.Read the case study →Case study 05 · Marketplace2M / dayMarketplace analytics at 2M writes a day: storage was 95% of the managed time-series bill, and our own instance came out about $27,000 a year cheaper, by our estimate. A retention change cut storage to $1.31 a month, and the managed service still cost more, this time because it charges for every query a customer’s dashboard runs.Read the case study →
FAQ
Questions about this service
Read access to billing and CloudWatch, and to the repositories, because the architectural causes only show up in the code. We don’t need to see production data.
We can. The fixes are billed by the hour as separate work, and we start once the review has shown which ones are worth making.
Then the document recommends it and shows the numbers behind the recommendation. Several times, though, the conclusion was to stay on the current platform.
Next step
Describe the problem and we’ll come back with three options.
The first call takes 30 minutes, and you’re under no obligation.