Fixed-price AWS cost assessment
AWS Cost Assessment
A ranked backlog of cost reductions priced from your own billing data, with effort, risk, rollback guidance, and a verification method on every backlog item. The report also covers material reliability risks and AI workload costs where those workloads exist.
What you receive
Spend baseline
A 13-month trend from Cost Explorer, plus the most detailed current-quarter breakdown supported by your existing billing exports, cost-allocation tags, and allocation data. Any resolution limits are stated in the report, and unexplained bill increases are decomposed as far as the available data allows.
Ranked savings backlog
Material findings that meet the evidence threshold. Each includes the finding, available billing and resource evidence, first-year dollars, effort in engineer-days, production risk, confidence, a suggested owning team where the data supports it, rollback guidance, and a named verification method.
Commitment posture
Savings Plans and Reserved Instance coverage and utilization, expiring commitments, and renewal risk. Purchase decisions remain with your finance and engineering teams; the assessment does not execute purchases.
AI workload cost review
Where present: Bedrock, SageMaker, GPU instances, and inference infrastructure. Workload, team, or feature attribution is included only where your existing tags, allocation data, and telemetry support it.
Reliability findings
Material exposures under growth or partial failure, such as single-AZ dependencies, missing alarms on revenue paths, backup and disaster-recovery gaps, and quota ceilings. Each is tied to available evidence and a business consequence.
Implementation options and walkthrough
Fixed-price implementation options mapped to backlog clusters and their identified dollars, plus an included walkthrough and Q&A. The report is written for direct implementation by your engineering team.
Pricing and scope
The assessment is quoted from the agreed account scope, available billing history, and workload complexity.
from $5,000 fixed
Typical assessment range
Most assessments are $5,000 to $7,500. For organizations above $200k/month in AWS spend, the assessment is typically $10,000 to $15,000.
scope-based
What affects the quote
Account and organization count, available billing exports and history, regional and workload complexity, AI workload scope, and explicit exclusions.
The final scope and fixed price are confirmed in writing before access is granted. Payment is split 50% on signature and 50% on delivery of the written report, with no hourly billing.
Assessment fee and implementation. Up to $5,000 of the assessment fee applies once to the first Cost Reduction or Reliability Hardening Sprint contracted within 90 days of report delivery. It does not apply to retainers.
Access model
The assessment uses the minimum access needed to analyze billing and resource metadata. Optional telemetry is separately explained and approved. Implementation is a separate engagement. See the security and data-handling details.
Read-only permissions
Billing and approved service-specific resource metadata only, using a provided IAM role template with no broad AWS-managed read policy and no production write permissions.
No production changes
The assessment does not modify infrastructure, purchase commitments, or change account configuration.
No application data
No customer data, application secrets, database contents, object contents, or application source code is required.
Optional telemetry
CloudWatch, Kubernetes metrics, observability tools, client-produced sanitized Bedrock invocation aggregates, and short flow-log samples are used only when needed for a specific finding and are separately approved. Direct access to raw Bedrock invocation logs is not requested.
Optional infrastructure-as-code access
Repository read access is optional, separately approved, and used only to improve effort and implementation guidance.
Documented access lifecycle
A data-handling checklist is agreed before access, and revocation is confirmed in writing after delivery.
Common questions
How is this different from AWS recommendations?
Cost Optimization Hub, Compute Optimizer, and related AWS services are inputs to the assessment. I validate their recommendations against your billing history and architecture, resolve overlaps, sequence dependent changes, and add expected savings, a suggested owning team where the data supports it, implementation effort, production risk, rollback guidance, and a billing-verification method.
Does this add value if we already use a FinOps tool?
If your team is already implementing and verifying its recommendations regularly, an assessment may add little value. If recommendations are accumulating without clear owning teams or approved implementation work, the assessment provides the engineering plan needed to move them forward.
Can you guarantee savings?
No. The report identifies savings from your billing data, but realized savings depend on which changes your team approves and implements. Results are verified against billing data after the relevant reporting lag. Implementation is a separate decision and scope.
How do I know the numbers are real?
Each dollar figure traces to a saved calculation over the available billing data. The report states the evidence and resolution behind each figure, along with the billing measure used to verify an implemented change after the relevant reporting lag.
What if the assessment finds less than its fee?
The fee covers the agreed analysis and engineer-ready report, not a minimum savings outcome. I review your spend, account scope, available billing history, and existing optimization process before proposing the engagement. If the intake suggests the assessment is unlikely to produce decision-useful findings, I will say so rather than recommend that you buy it.
What do you need from us?
A signed order form, a countersigned data-handling checklist, read-only access via a provided IAM role template, and a written intake questionnaire. Your team's setup effort depends on its access process and the available billing exports. The ten-day clock starts when the agreed access is available, not at signature.
