Cloud
We cut a client's cloud bill by 46%. Here's exactly how.
By Daniel Okafor, Head of Cloud · Published on · 9 minute read
No magic, no vendor lock-in — just a methodical look at what was running, why, and whether it needed to.
Last spring, a logistics client came to us with a simple problem: their AWS bill had grown from $18,000 to $52,000 per month in a single year, and nobody could explain why.
Step 1: Tag everything
You can't optimise what you can't measure. We spent the first week making sure every resource had an owner, a project and an environment tag. Surprisingly, 22% of the spend belonged to resources nobody claimed.
Step 2: Delete the zombies
Old staging environments, forgotten load-testing clusters, snapshots from 2021 — we found and removed 340 unused resources in two days.
Step 3: Right-size and reserve
Most databases were running at less than 15% CPU. Moving them to smaller instances and buying reserved capacity for the steady workloads saved another $11,000 per month.
| Measure | Monthly saving |
|---|---|
| Removing unused resources | $7,400 |
| Right-sizing databases | $6,100 |
| Reserved capacity | $4,900 |
| Storage lifecycle rules | $5,500 |
The total: $23,900 saved every month, or 46% of the original bill. Read more about our Cloud & DevOps services.