Cloud cost audit
A fixed-price, fixed-scope audit of your AWS spend — for owners and finance leads paying a bill nobody has fully explained, and for engineers who want evidence before re-architecting anything.
From £4,950
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, attributes the spend to the products and suppliers behind it, and delivers a severity-ranked report, a summary for the people who approve the bill, and a prioritised savings roadmap — at a fixed price agreed up front.
Who is a cloud cost audit for?
Businesses running production workloads on AWS whose bill has grown without a clear account of why. It is common where agencies or freelancers build and run the software and nobody in-house owns the infrastructure. Typical triggers: spend rising faster than customers or traffic, explanations from suppliers that stay general, several products sharing one account, or a budget review the figures cannot yet support.
- Production workloads on AWS
- Spend rising without a clear explanation
- Infrastructure run by suppliers rather than in-house
- Several products sharing one account
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 — 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, and attributes each cost to the product or supplier that drives it. It covers compute sizing and idle capacity, storage, data transfer, orphaned resources, commitment coverage, and the architectural choices behind the biggest line items. It also records who controls the account and how much of the estate depends on AWS-specific services, because both decide what a saving will cost to make.
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.
- Cost by product, environment, and supplier
- Compute right-sizing and idle capacity
- Storage classes, growth, and retention
- Data-transfer and content-delivery costs
- Unused and orphaned resources
- Commitment coverage (Savings Plans, Reserved Instances)
- Architecture-level cost drivers
- Account ownership and administrative access
- Portability: what would run elsewhere, and what is AWS-only
What does a cloud cost audit cost?
The audit starts from £4,950 for one AWS account and the workloads in it, with scope and price agreed before work begins. Several products sharing that account fall within the same audit; multi-account organisations are quoted separately. The fee covers the assessment and savings roadmap, and implementing the recommendations is separately scoped and priced. Estimated savings are findings, not a guarantee of a lower bill.
Ian Compton leads the work, with specialist help where required. He reads your enquiry personally; the usual next step is a free 20–30 minute technical fit call to check scope, access and likely budget.
Discuss your AWS billUK company and contracting entity · UK GDPR-aware delivery · Independent — nothing to resell · Read-only access; nothing in the estate is changed
Why is an AWS bill so high?
AWS bills usually grow by accretion rather than through one decision: servers sized for a launch and never reduced, storage that is never deleted, data transfer charged on every byte that leaves the estate, and test environments left running. Where several suppliers deploy into one account, each change can be reasonable on its own while the total is nobody's responsibility. The invoice shows which services cost money; explaining why takes the usage data and the architecture behind it.
What if our supplier controls the AWS account?
Then the first finding concerns control rather than cost. Where hosting runs in a supplier's own account, or is resold as a single line on their invoice, the audit cannot see the bill it is meant to explain. The technical ownership review is the better starting point in that case: it establishes what the business owns, what it can access, and how to bring the account into its own name.
What you receive
- A jargon-free summary: where the money goes, what can change, and roughly what it is worth
- A written findings report — severity-ranked, each item with estimated impact and a concrete recommendation
- Spend attributed to each product and supplier, as far as the account's structure allows
- A prioritised savings roadmap — quick wins vs architectural work
- Recommended spend alerts, so the next increase reaches you before the invoice does
- A “further investigation recommended” section for anything material outside the fixed scope
- A findings walkthrough call, with a separate technical session for your engineers or supplier if you want one
How the engagement runs
- Typical turnaround: two weeks from start to report
- Fixed scope and fixed price — from £4,950, agreed before work starts
- A deposit books the start; the balance is due when the report is delivered
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
- Invoices for related services, such as a CDN or hosting billed through a supplier
- A short walkthrough with whoever runs the infrastructure, where that is possible
- If nobody in the business can currently sign in to the AWS account, say so: regaining that access comes first, and the audit sets out how
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, from £4,950 for one AWS account and the workloads in it, and both stay fixed, whatever the estate turns out to contain.
Do our developers or hosting supplier need to be involved?
Not to start. Billing data and read-only access are enough to begin, and the audit changes nothing in the estate. A short walkthrough with whoever runs the infrastructure sharpens the findings, and questions only the builders can answer go to them. The report belongs to you and is written for whoever implements it: your own engineers, your current supplier, or another firm.
Should we stay on AWS at all?
The audit establishes the fact that decides it: how much of the estate uses services built only for AWS, and how much would run on any provider. Virtual servers and standard databases move between providers readily; AWS-specific managed services have to be rebuilt elsewhere. The report states which the estate relies on and what a move would involve, without assuming one.
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 — from quick-win right-sizing through to the architectural changes with the largest returns, priced once the findings are in. The audit itself assumes no follow-on: 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.
Want to know what your AWS bill is paying for? Let's talk.
Get in touchIan Compton reads your message personally. The usual next step is a free 20–30 minute technical fit call to check the problem, scope and likely budget.