Cloud cost review checklist
The five places 30–40% of your cloud bill is hiding, with the checks to run.
The checklist #
| Check | Typical saving |
|---|---|
| Right-size compute against real p95 utilization (not the estimate from two years ago) | 10–15% of total bill |
| Schedule non-production environments to working hours | 60–70% of their cost |
| Lifecycle policies on snapshots, logs, and orphaned volumes | 5–10% of total bill |
| Reserved capacity / savings plans on provable baseline workloads | 30–40% of covered spend |
| Audit data transfer: cross-AZ chatter, missing CDN, NAT gateway attribution | Highly variable — often the surprise item |
How to run it yourself #
Pull 90 days of billing data, sort by service, and for the top ten lines ask: what is this, and who owns it? Any line nobody can explain in one sentence is a candidate. Fix the scheduling and lifecycle items first — they are afternoons of work with permanent payoff — then take the reserved-capacity decision with twelve months of usage in front of you.
NotePrefer it done for you? Our cost reviews are fixed-price, take two weeks, and pay for themselves in the first month — or we tell you up front that your bill is already tight.
What we need to start (and what we do not) #
A cost review needs read-only billing and inventory access — nothing that can change or break anything: billing/cost-explorer read access, read-only infrastructure inventory, and 30 minutes with whoever knows the workloads best. We do not need production data access, deploy rights, or write access of any kind. Output in two weeks: a ranked savings list with effort estimates, the subset we can implement immediately on approval, and the honest line items where the answer is "leave it, it is fine."
NoteIf your bill is already tight, the review says so — that finding costs you the fixed fee and buys you the confidence. It has happened; clients did not regret it.
Maintained by the delivery team · updated quarterly