AWS Cost Audit · Fixed €5K · 1 Week Delivery
AWS Cost Audit: See Exactly What “Doing Nothing” Costs You
If your startup spends €5K–500K/month on AWS, you’re almost certainly wasting 30–40% of it. Not because your team is careless - because AWS is complex and nobody’s job is to watch the bill.
Here’s the part that hurts: every month you wait to find out, that waste compounds. A typical startup losing €10K/month in waste burns €60K in the 6 months it takes to “think about it.”
This audit quantifies exactly what you’re losing - resource by resource, euro by euro - in 7 days.
Want to see what you're buying? View a sample audit report →
Prefer to talk first? Free 30-min call available →
What Gets Audited
30+ checks across every major AWS cost driver, prioritized by annual savings impact. Each finding includes a real dollar amount - no vague recommendations.
Compute (EC2, ECS, Lambda)
- CPU, memory, network, and EBS I/O rightsizing analysis
- Graviton migration candidates (20–40% savings)
- Idle and zombie instance detection
- Auto Scaling configuration review
- Typical finding: oversized m5.2xlarge → t4g.large saves $400–800/month
Database (RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache)
- Instance rightsizing (CPU, RAM, IOPS utilization)
- Storage type optimization: gp2 → gp3 migration
- Aurora Serverless v2 candidacy for variable workloads
- Reserved Instance purchase recommendations
- Typical finding: RDS Multi-AZ gp2 → gp3 saves $300–600/month
Networking (NAT Gateway, Data Transfer, VPC)
- Gateway VPC Endpoint opportunities for S3 and DynamoDB
- Cross-AZ traffic analysis and consolidation
- CloudFront caching optimization
- Interface Endpoint vs NAT Gateway cost comparison
- Typical finding: S3 Gateway Endpoint eliminates $800–3,000/month in NAT fees
Storage (S3, EBS)
- Unattached EBS volume and orphaned snapshot cleanup
- gp2 → gp3 volume migration (20% savings, no performance loss)
- S3 Intelligent-Tiering and lifecycle policy analysis
- Over-provisioned io1/io2 IOPS detection
- Typical finding: gp2 → gp3 migration saves $200–500/month
Commitments (Savings Plans, Reserved Instances)
- Current Savings Plans utilization and coverage analysis
- New Compute Savings Plan purchase recommendations
- RDS Reserved Instance opportunities
- 3-month trailing baseline calculation for safe commitment sizing
- Typical finding: 1-year Compute Savings Plan saves $2,000–8,000/month
What Does Waiting Actually Cost?
Let’s do the math together:
| If your monthly AWS waste is... | Then 6 months of “thinking about it” costs... |
|---|---|
| €5,000/month | €30,000 |
| €15,000/month | €90,000 |
| €40,000/month | €240,000 |
The audit fee is €5,000. It pays for itself in the first week of implementation - and the guarantee means you pay nothing if it doesn’t find at least 3× that.
The real question isn’t “Can I afford this audit?”
It’s “Can I afford another month without it?”
How the Audit Works
Three steps from access grant to delivered report. No disruption to your engineering team.
Access & Discovery
I provide a one-line bash script that creates a read-only IAM role in under 5 minutes. You run it once per AWS account and share the Role ARN and External ID with me. That's all the access I need to get started.
Analysis
Automated + manual analysis across all 5 pillars above, prioritized by annual savings impact. I use AWS Cost Explorer, Compute Optimizer, CloudWatch, VPC Flow Logs and much more.
Deliverables
Prioritized findings report with dollar figures per finding, specific CLI commands your team can execute, Google Sheets tracker to track implementation progress, and a 30-minute walkthrough call to review the results together.
Key point: Every finding includes specific resource IDs, exact dollar amounts, and copy-paste CLI commands - not vague suggestions. Your team knows exactly what to do and why.
What You Get
Every audit delivers the same complete set of deliverables - no tiered packages.
See what the audit dashboard looks like with a sample report →
Executive Savings Summary
Board-ready one-pager with total identified savings, top findings, and ROI calculation.
Detailed Findings Report
Full report per service: EC2, RDS, networking, storage, commitments - each finding with specific resource IDs, dollar amounts, and CLI commands.
Commitment Purchase Plan
Savings Plans schedule with exact dollar amounts and recommended purchase timing.
Secure Audit Dashboard
All findings prioritized by savings, effort estimates, risk level, and implementation status - accessible via a secure token-gated dashboard at reports.cloudcostdown.eu.
30-Min Walkthrough Call
Live Q&A to walk through findings, answer questions, and help your team prioritize what to tackle first.
NDA & Read-Only Access
No data leaves your account. NDA signed before access is granted.
The Math That Makes This Easy
Fixed Price: €5,000 · One-time. Invoice after delivery. No hourly billing, no scope creep.
Here’s how the scale tips
- Audit fee€5,000
- Minimum savings guaranteed (or you don't pay)€15,000/year
- Typical savings found€50K–200K/year
- Cost of waiting 6 more months without auditing€30K–240K
The Guarantee
3× ROI or Free
The guarantee is in writing in the service agreement: if I can’t find at least €15,000 in annual savings, you pay €0.
This guarantee is not a marketing claim - it’s a contract term.
So the only real risk here is doing nothing.
Who This Is For
Good fit
- Series A–C startups spending €5K–500K/month on AWS
- Engineering teams scaling fast without a dedicated FinOps role
- CTOs who want implementation, not another dashboard
- Companies using Terraform, CDK, or CloudFormation (or willing to start)
- Founders who want to impress investors with lean unit economics
Not a fit
- ✕Pre-seed companies with less than €5K/month AWS spend
- ✕Enterprises with an existing dedicated FinOps team
- ✕Multi-cloud environments (AWS-only focus)
- ✕Companies needing real-time changes during the audit window
Still weighing it?
Most founders who book the audit tell me the same thing afterward: “I wish I’d done this 6 months ago.”
Not because the audit was complex - it took them 5 minutes to set up. But because they spent months “thinking about it” while the waste quietly compounded. Every one of them could calculate exactly what that delay cost.
If you already know your AWS bill is too high, the question isn’t whether to audit. It’s whether to keep paying the “doing nothing” tax for another month.
About Your Auditor
Adam Pavlát
AWS Cost Optimization Consultant
Former cloud engineer at Disney+ Hotstar and Merck/MSD, where I managed infrastructure serving 50M+ concurrent users. I've seen what happens when cloud spend scales without controls - and how to fix it quickly.
With CloudCostDown, I bring the same rigour applied at enterprise scale to Series A–C startups. You work directly with me - not a junior analyst from a consultancy.