How do you cut a cloud bill by more than 70%?
Not through instance right-sizing alone; that gets you maybe 15%. The real reduction comes from attacking the bill on several fronts at once: right-sizing what's overprovisioned, simplifying the stack so a smaller team can run it, pursuing cloud credits and commercial programs, and optimizing pricing models and architecture across the whole account.
Every engagement starts with a forensic audit of your last three months of billing data. You get a line-by-line map of where money leaks: idle compute, over-provisioned databases, egress traps, orphaned storage, unoptimized LLM token spend, and per-seat SaaS that infrastructure could replace.
The four levers we pull on your cloud bill
Right-size what's overprovisioned. We review how your workloads actually run, find the compute, databases and storage you're paying for but not fully using, and right-size them without hurting performance.
Simplify the stack. Complex infrastructure needs a big team to operate. We flatten the DevOps and infrastructure footprint so a leaner team can run it, which cuts cloud cost and operational cost at the same time.
Pursue cloud credits and commercial programs. We identify the credit and incentive programs you may qualify for, help you apply, and connect you to the right contacts where we can. We pursue credits aggressively, but we never guarantee a specific amount.
Optimize the whole bill. We look across unused and underutilized resources, pricing models and commitments, managed-service markups, architectural complexity, operational overhead and available credits, then fix the ones that actually move the number.
What does a cloud cost audit include?
A compute and autoscaling review (EC2, GKE, AKS, and serverless versus reserved trade-offs). Database and storage tiering (Postgres, MongoDB, Redis, S3 lifecycle). Network egress analysis. LLM and AI inference cost engineering: model routing, caching, batching and self-hosted STT/TTS. A cloud credits strategy, which I've run to secure $300K via Microsoft for Startups and AWS Activate. And a prioritized savings roadmap with a dollar estimate on each item.
What do cloud cost optimization services cost?
Two models. A fixed-fee audit, where you get the full leak map and roadmap and your team implements. Or savings-share, where I implement the re-architecture and take a percentage of the first year's verified savings, so if your bill doesn't drop, I don't get paid. US and EU startups typically see payback in the first month.
| Engagement | What you get | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Cost Audit | Line-by-line leak map + prioritized savings roadmap (2 weeks) | $4,500 fixed |
| Audit + Implementation | I re-architect and migrate; verified savings report | 20% of year-1 savings |
| Credits Sprint | Microsoft/AWS/GCP startup credit applications done right | $1,500 fixed |