Cloud cost optimization services
Your cloud bill grew faster than your traffic, and nobody is quite sure which line item is to blame. I find where the money actually goes and bring it down, without trading away the reliability you are paying for.
What is cloud cost optimization?
Cloud cost optimization is the work of matching what you spend to what you actually use. Most bills carry 30 to 60% of avoidable waste: over-provisioned nodes, idle resources, the wrong pricing model, and egress nobody budgeted for. The cluster works, so the waste compounds quietly month after month.
I treat it as an engineering problem, not a spreadsheet exercise. The same hands that design and run the infrastructure go through compute, storage, data transfer and tooling, fix the root causes, and leave you with cost visibility you can keep.
What the service covers
Right-sizing
Match compute and memory to real usage so you stop paying for reserved headroom that never gets used.
Pricing model
Reserved Instances and Savings Plans for steady-state load (up to ~72% off), spot capacity for the elastic middle (up to ~90% off).
Autoscaling
Scale nodes and pods with demand so idle capacity stops running overnight and on weekends.
Egress & data transfer
Find the cross-zone and cross-region transfer that quietly inflates the bill, and keep traffic where it belongs.
Observability cost
Tame Datadog and logging spend: metric cardinality, log indexing, host counts and retention.
Cost visibility
Tagging, budgets and alerting so the savings hold instead of drifting back up after I leave.
How the engagement works
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1. Audit
I map your bill to its real cost drivers and rank the waste by how much it costs and how hard it is to fix.
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2. Quick wins
We start with the changes that carry no architectural risk: orphaned resources, right-sizing and commitment pricing.
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3. Structural fixes
Autoscaling, spot adoption, egress and observability changes that need more engineering, done as code.
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4. Keep it down
Guardrails, budgets and a short playbook so your team can hold the line without me.
Where I cut cost
Provider-agnostic, with the deepest experience where the bills hurt most: Kubernetes, AWS and observability tooling.
AWS
Right-sizing, Savings Plans, reserved and spot capacity, storage tiering and egress reduction.
Kubernetes
Cluster right-sizing, bin-packing and spot node pools for stateless and batch workloads.
Datadog
Custom-metric cardinality, log indexing and APM spend that balloons without anyone deciding it should.
Google Cloud & Azure
Committed-use and sustained-use discounts, autoscaling and storage tiers to trim steady-state spend.
Where the savings usually come from
Every environment is different, but the biggest wins tend to land in the same few places. I have written these up in detail on the blog.
Over-provisioning
Wrong pricing model
Idle resources
Egress
Observability
Snowflake & data
Pricing
One fixed price for the audit. If the audit finds less than the fee in annual savings, you do not pay for it — at typical scale that has never been close.
Cloud Cost Audit
€4,500 fixed price
Two weeks, read-only access to billing and infrastructure. You get a ranked savings plan: a euro amount per finding, effort estimates and risk notes, walked through with your team.
Implementation — day rate
€850 per day
I execute the plan with your team: a quick-wins sprint of around five days, or structural fixes in ten to fifteen. You keep 100% of the savings.
Implementation — success fee
20% of first-year savings
Nothing upfront. The fee is 20% of documented first-year savings (minimum €2,500, capped at €25,000), measured against a baseline we agree on paper before work starts.
Quarterly cost review
€600 per quarter
A half-day check on drift, new waste and rate-card changes, so the bill stays down after the engagement ends.
Frequently asked questions
How much can you cut my cloud bill?
It varies, but most environments that have not been optimized carry 30 to 60% of avoidable waste. After an audit I can give you a grounded range for your specific setup rather than a generic promise.
Will cutting cost make things less reliable?
No. The goal is to remove waste, not the headroom you actually need. Right-sizing, commitment pricing and egress fixes change the bill, not the reliability. The safety margins that earn their keep stay put.
How do you charge for cost optimization?
The audit is a fixed €4,500 — two weeks, everything included, no hourly surprises. Implementation after the audit is your choice: €850 per day, or a success fee of 20% of documented first-year savings if you prefer zero upfront cost.
What if the audit finds nothing?
If the audit identifies less than €4,500 in annual savings, the fee is credited in full against implementation — or refunded. In practice, environments above €10,000 per month in cloud spend never come close to that floor.
How is the success fee measured?
Before work starts we sign a one-page measurement annex: a baseline month, an agreed list of attributable changes, a twelve-month window and a €25,000 cap. No ambiguity at invoice time.
What access do you need?
Read-only billing access (Cost Explorer or a billing export) and read-only infrastructure access. The audit phase needs no production credentials and changes nothing.
Which platforms do you cover?
Mainly AWS, Kubernetes and Datadog, where I have the deepest experience and where bills tend to hurt most, plus Google Cloud, Azure and Snowflake. You can also try the free Kubernetes cost calculator for a quick ballpark.
Want to know what is hiding in your cloud bill?
Send me your setup or a recent bill, and you will get an honest read on where the waste is and what it would take to cut it.