How our cloud cost optimization engagements work
Every engagement runs the same disciplined path: a read-only baseline, the no-regret savings first, structural moves alongside your engineers, then guardrails handed to your team. It is buyer-side, measured against your own numbers, and backed by a guarantee — we reduce your cloud spend or we reimburse our service fee.
Weeks 1–2 · The baseline
We connect read-only to every account across each provider and build one normalized cost model. On AWS the source of truth is the Cost and Usage Report; on Azure the cost exports and MACC drawdown; on GCP detailed billing export to BigQuery; on OCI the Cost Analysis console. You finish with a defensible number you can take to your board — and we finish with the map.
- Read-only connection to every account, every provider
- One normalized, FOCUS-aligned cost model
- A board-ready baseline in about two weeks
Weeks 3–5 · Quick wins
We start with the no-regret moves that carry no architectural risk: idle and orphaned resources, oversized instances, untiered storage, obvious rate moves such as Graviton and gp3, and clear commitment gaps. These pay for the engagement early and build the trust to do the harder work.
- Idle and orphaned resource recovery
- Rate moves: Graviton, gp3, flexible shapes
- The engagement typically pays for itself here
Weeks 5–10 · Structural
Alongside your engineers we reshape the workloads that drive the bill, and we set commitment coverage to a defensible forecast rather than the largest discount. Commitments are the biggest lever and the biggest risk — Savings Plans, Reservations, CUDs, and Universal Credits discount roughly 20–72% in exchange for utilization risk that you carry. We size that risk deliberately.
- Workload redesign that survives traffic spikes
- Commitment coverage sized to a defensible forecast
- Deliberate, quantified utilization-risk trade-offs
Weeks 10–13 · Govern & hand off
Guardrails, anomaly alerts, showback, and a review cadence go live, then we hand the keys to your team. This is the FinOps operating model that keeps spend flat as you grow. We stay on call, never in the way — and there is no lock-in to us.
- Guardrails, anomaly alerts, and showback live
- A review cadence your team owns
- No lock-in — a good engagement ends with you not needing us
How do you price the work?
We publish no price list because every estate is different. Engagements are scoped to your footprint with our sales team, always with the same guarantee: we reduce your cloud spend or we reimburse our service fee, and we take zero provider commissions. Ask sales for a quote.
Why independent matters here
Most cost optimization in the market is procurement in disguise: reselling commitments, chasing rebates, and leaving the hard engineering untouched. We take no provider commissions, so we have no reason to oversell a commitment or steer you toward one cloud. Every claim ties back to your own usage data, verified against billing. See the outcomes in our case studies.
How engagements work, answered.
How long before we see savings?
Will this slow our engineers down?
Do you take commissions from AWS, Azure, GCP, or OCI?
What happens when the engagement ends?
What if you do not find savings?
Book a strategy call with a senior analyst.
Thirty minutes with someone who has cut spend across all four major clouds. We will walk your situation and tell you honestly whether there is enough to justify an engagement.