Cloud cost audit
A fixed-price, fixed-scope audit of your AWS spend — for teams whose bill has grown faster than their traffic and who want evidence before re-architecting anything.
Last updated:A cloud cost audit is a fixed-scope review of where a cloud estate's money goes: compute sizing, storage classes and growth, data transfer, idle and orphaned resources, and the architectural decisions driving the largest line items. Revenant Systems works from AWS billing and usage data, and delivers a severity-ranked report with a prioritised savings roadmap — at a fixed price agreed up front.
Who is a cloud cost audit for?
A cloud cost audit fits teams running production workloads on AWS whose bill has grown organically — through scaling, migrations, or simple accretion — and who lack a clear account of what drives it. Typical triggers: spend rising faster than traffic, a looming budget review, or an estate nobody fully owns.
- Production workloads on AWS
- Spend growing faster than traffic
- No single owner of the bill
Who is the audit not for?
Teams looking for a generic billing clean-up, or marginal savings on a tiny account. The audit earns its fee on production AWS estates where cost, architecture, ownership, or growth has become material — over-provisioned clusters, hot data that should be cold — not where the answer is a smaller instance and a closed tab.
What does the audit assess?
The audit works from billing and usage data down to the architecture behind it: compute right-sizing and idle capacity, storage classes, growth, and retention, data-transfer costs, unused and orphaned resources, commitment coverage (Savings Plans, Reserved Instances), and the architectural choices — oversized clusters, hot data that should be cold — behind the biggest line items.
In a previous role the founder led exactly this kind of redesign, cutting a platform's AWS infrastructure costs by around 60% while its traffic doubled.
- Compute right-sizing and idle capacity
- Storage classes, growth, and retention
- Data-transfer costs
- Unused and orphaned resources
- Commitment coverage (Savings Plans, Reserved Instances)
- Architecture-level cost drivers
What you receive
- A written findings report — severity-ranked, each item with estimated impact and a concrete recommendation
- A prioritised savings roadmap — quick wins vs architectural work
- A “further investigation recommended” section for anything material outside the fixed scope
- A findings walkthrough call
How the engagement runs
- Typical turnaround: two weeks from start to report
- Fixed scope and fixed price, agreed before work starts
What we need from you
- Read-only access to AWS billing and Cost Explorer data — or exported reports
- Read-only access to the estate, or an architecture walkthrough
- A short walkthrough with whoever owns the infrastructure
Access and client data are handled under our information security statement.
Frequently asked questions
Is the audit genuinely fixed-price?
Yes — scope and price are agreed before the audit starts, and both stay fixed, whatever the estate turns out to contain.
What about findings outside the agreed scope?
They are recorded in the report under further investigation rather than silently expanding the engagement, and can be scoped separately if you want them pursued.
Can you implement the savings too?
Yes, as separately scoped follow-on work — from quick-win right-sizing through to the architectural changes with the largest returns. The audit stands alone regardless: the report gives your team the evidence and the sequencing to act on it themselves.
Each package is an audit or assessment offered on its own — the process behind it is covered in how we work.