ยท 4 min read
Case study: the cloud bill from EUR 74 000 to EUR 43 000 a month.
One engagement, told in numbers. Logistics SaaS, about 30 engineers, everything on AWS. Details are shifted enough that the company cannot be recognised; the shape and the orders of magnitude are real.
The starting point
The AWS bill stood at EUR 74 000 a month and had grown about 4 percent a month for two years, while revenue grew half that fast. Finance had negotiated a savings plan twice; the curve did not move, because the problem was not the price of the machines. Nobody in the building could say what a third of the bill bought.
What the diagnosis found
Three weeks of reading the spend against the architecture and the traffic. The bill split into three kinds of money:
- Waste, about EUR 19 000 a month. Three full environments for a product line sold off a year earlier. Kubernetes clusters running at 20 percent utilisation because nobody dared change the node sizes. Snapshots and logs retained forever by default.
- The price of technical debt, about EUR 12 000 a month. A data pipeline that stored every intermediate result three times, built in a hurry in 2023 and owned by nobody since the author left.
- The real cost of the business, about EUR 43 000 a month. What the product actually needs at current traffic.
The numbers after 5 months
| Before | After 5 months | |
|---|---|---|
| AWS bill, monthly | EUR 74 000 | EUR 43 000 |
| Trend | Plus 4 percent a month | Flat against traffic |
| Layoffs | None | |
| Re-platforming | None. The stack stayed. | |
| Owners named for the top 10 cost lines | 2 of 10 | 10 of 10 |
What it took
The fixed-price diagnosis, then one day a week for four months alongside the existing team. The engineers did the work; what had been missing was not skill but a mandate, a sequence, and someone senior enough to decide what could be switched off. The saving of about EUR 370 000 a year cost a low five-figure engagement.
Why it worked
Every line of the bill got a named owner, and the debt got a monthly price the board could see. Once "the pipeline costs EUR 12 000 a month to not fix" was written down, fixing it stopped being a technical discussion and became an ordinary business decision. That is usually the whole trick: the bill is an ownership problem wearing a pricing costume.
Anonymised by design: sector, sizes and timings are shifted, the structure of what happened is not. References, including for this engagement, on the intro call.