Tagging, resizing and commitments
Every line of your cloud bill should have an owner.
We read twelve months of your bill and trace each rise to the team that caused it. You get a report of everything we switched off.
Most cost reviews start with one of these.
- The cloud bill goes up every quarter without anyone approving the increase.
- Finance asks why the bill went up, and it takes a week to get an answer.
- Someone wants to sign a three-year commitment to get the rate down.
If one of these sounds familiar, talk to us before you sign a commitment.
Contact usWhat we take on.
What we report back
Each month we report every rise in spend and what we switched off.
- We tag every resource to a team, so the bill can be split by who caused it.
- We find resources with no owner, such as disks with no machine attached and projects that have finished.
- We resize machines to match the load they carry today.
- We schedule test environments to switch off outside working hours.
- We set retention periods, so old backups and logs are deleted on a schedule.
- We use the licences you already own before buying any commitment.
- Every saving we report can be checked on your own invoice the following month.
Five reasons a cloud bill keeps going up.
Each one made sense when it was set up, and has not been looked at since.
Projects left running
When a project ends, its servers and databases often stay running, because it is not clear they are safe to delete. The bill steps up with every new project and does not come back down.
What you can check afterwards
You get a list of everything we removed, with the date and the name of the person who agreed to it.
Oversized machines
The size was picked before the real load was known, and it has not been checked since. It costs the same every month, however little the machine is doing.
What you can check afterwards
For each machine we resize, you can see the usage we measured before choosing the new size.
Storage that only ever grows
Every backup, log and old file is still being paid for, and only your business can say which of it is finished with. The charge goes up a little every month.
What you can check afterwards
Every retention period we set has the name of the person on your side who chose it.
Commitments bought too early
The commitment was sized to the estate as it stood, before anything had been tidied. It is charged every month of the term, even after the machines it was bought for are switched off.
What you can check afterwards
You can see each commitment, what it covers and the date it ends.
Spend with no owner
Anything without a team or project tag lands on the bill as one lump, and it gets paid because tracing it by hand takes a day. It starts small, then grows faster as more is built without a tag.
What you can check afterwards
Each month's spend is split by the team that caused it, in that month's report.
The columns show the shape a cloud bill usually takes over a year. They are not taken from a real bill.
Buying a discount before reading the bill.
Someone asks the provider for a better rate, or signs a three-year commitment to bring the price down.
The discount then applies to machines that should have been switched off, and the bill starts climbing again once people stop watching it.
We work out what is running and who owns it, and switch off what is not needed. After that, we buy a commitment sized to what is left.
Questions we get asked.
We cannot give you a percentage before we have seen your bill. You hear what we found before you sign anything, and if the estate is already tidy, the report says so.
Finance can see the total going up, but usually not which change caused it. Most of this work is matching each rise on the bill to the change behind it.
We switch nothing off until a named person on your side has agreed. Anything without an owner is stopped first, with that person's agreement, and deleted later, so it can be started again if someone turns out to need it.
Yes. The discounts have different names on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, but the bill grows for the same five reasons on each.
Where this page sits.
Our work sits in three layers, and each one depends on the one beneath it. The page you are reading is marked.
You are hereCloud Cost Control
Foundations
Start with what the estate costs today.
In the Fortnight we read twelve months of your spend and explain each rise in it. You keep the findings whether or not you carry on with us.
You get a written scope before you commit to anything.