The Cloud Cost Health Check
Three days. Fixed scope. Fixed price. An independent review of your cloud estate that tells you where the money goes, what it should cost, and exactly what to do about the difference.
3 days
from access to findings
Fixed
price and scope, agreed up front
~29%
of cloud spend is typically wasted
0%
of our revenue from vendor commission
You suspect you're overspending. Now you'll know.
Industry surveys consistently put wasted cloud spend at around 29% of budgets. Almost every estate we review carries some of it: commitments that lapsed quietly, instances sized for a launch that never recurred, storage in the wrong tier, components nobody dares switch off.
The free cost report from your vendor or your tooling can list resources. It cannot tell you which of them matter, what fixing them is worth against the effort, or whether that spare capacity is waste or the headroom your platform genuinely needs. That judgement is what you are buying: senior engineers who have spent ten years telling the difference.
Book one when
The bill has grown faster than the business and nobody can fully explain why
An enterprise agreement or commitment renewal is inside the next six months
Finance and engineering give different answers to the same question about spend
Budgets or investors are asking what the cloud line item actually buys
How the three days work
Day one
Where the money goes
We work through your billing and usage data across every account, subscription and project, and map spend to the teams and workloads actually driving it. Most organisations see their estate laid out this way for the first time.
Day two
What it should cost
Commitment and reservation coverage, utilisation, right-sizing, storage tiering, and the architectural red flags that no automated report can judge. This is where engineering experience earns its place: telling waste apart from headroom takes judgement, not a scanner.
Day three
What to do about it
Findings are prioritised by value, effort and risk, written up, and presented in a briefing with finance and engineering in the same room, working from the same numbers.
What you take away
A written picture of your estate as it actually is, not as it was designed
A prioritised action plan, with every opportunity sized in pounds alongside its effort and risk
A commitment and reservation plan set against your renewal dates
A findings briefing for finance and engineering together
Fixed scope, fixed price
One price for the three days, agreed in writing before we start. No day-rate creep, no discovery phase that discovers it needs another discovery phase. If your estate is unusually large or fragmented, we will say so before we begin, not on an invoice afterwards.
And because Cloudreason takes no commission from any vendor, nothing in the findings is shaped by what we might sell you. The report would look exactly the same if you never spoke to us again.
What happens afterwards
Nothing, unless you want it to. Some clients take the plan and run it with their own teams; the report is written so they can. Many ask us to carry on and do the work, keep the commitments current and stop the estate drifting back. That ongoing service is Managed FinOps, and the health check is how almost every one of those engagements began. If you want a sense of how we think before we arrive, our FinOps guides cover optimisation, commitments, allocation and storage in the open.
If the date you are working to is an audit rather than a budget, there is a compliance equivalent: the Cloud Compliance Health Check assesses your estate against a framework the same way. Start from Cloud Compliance.
Frequently asked questions
How long does the Cloud Cost Health Check take?
Three days from access to findings. Day one maps where the money goes, day two establishes what the estate should cost, and day three turns the gap into a prioritised plan, briefed to finance and engineering together.
What do you need from us to start?
Read-only access to your billing and usage data, and a short session with your finance and engineering contacts. We install no agents and make no changes to your estate during the review.
How much does the health check cost?
One fixed price for the three days, agreed in writing before we start, with the scope fixed alongside it. If your estate is unusually large or fragmented, we say so before we begin, never on an invoice afterwards.
Is this just an automated cost report?
No. Tools produce the data; the product is judgement. Senior engineers with ten years of cloud cost work decide which findings matter, what fixing each is worth against its effort and risk, and which spare capacity is genuine headroom rather than waste. A scanner cannot make those calls.
What happens after the three days?
Nothing, unless you want it to. The report and plan are yours to keep, written so your own team can act on them. Many clients ask us to carry on and do the work as an ongoing Managed FinOps engagement, which is how almost all of our retained relationships began.
Do you cover Azure and Google Cloud as well as AWS?
Yes. The health check runs on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, and on multi-cloud estates where spend needs reading across platforms on a single set of numbers.
Book a Cloud Cost Health Check
Three days from access to answers. Get in touch and we'll agree the scope, the price and the start date.