Most AWS accounts waste 30% of their bill. We find it — free.
9 in 10 accounts we review identify 30% or more in recoverable spend. Some find over 60%. You grant read-only access. We run the analysis and walk you through what to change and the estimated savings. No implementation work is needed for the review.
Read-only access. No agents. No changes made to your account.
Why it is free, plainly
Because it is how we start conversations. We would rather spend time in your account than send you a slide deck. Some reviews turn into engagements. Most do not, and that is a fair trade for us.
The findings are specific to your account — line items, not generalisations. You own them whether you hire us or not. We do not watermark the output, and we do not run a follow-up sales sequence.
We run a limited number each month, because engineers do them and engineers are the constraint. If slots are full we will say so and give you a date.
Where AWS spend hides
These are the patterns we look for. Most accounts carry several of them simultaneously.
Instances sized for a peak load from two years ago, running at 8% CPU. The fix is a right-size or a Graviton move, and either saves immediately.
On-demand pricing for workloads that run 24/7. A Compute Savings Plan typically covers these with 30–60% less spend and no lock-in on instance type.
Data written to S3 Standard and never accessed again. Intelligent-Tiering or Glacier Instant Retrieval eliminates this automatically without application changes.
Traffic crossing Availability Zones on every request. Localising service-to-service calls within one AZ where resilience tolerates it removes the charge entirely.
Volumes, snapshots, database instances and NAT gateways that carry a bill but serve no live traffic. Deletion is the fix and it is immediate.
Private subnet traffic routing through a NAT gateway to reach S3 or DynamoDB. A VPC endpoint removes the NAT hop and the data-processing charge.
What happens, and when
About one week from your request to the walkthrough call. Your team needs roughly one hour in total.
What you get, itemised
A sixty-minute call, no watermark, no expiry.
Who this fits
The review is free, so we are honest about where it is worth your time and ours.
A good fit
An AWS account with meaningful monthly spend, a named technical contact who can create a read-only IAM role, and a real motivation — a budget conversation ahead of you, a bill that has crept, or inherited infrastructure you have not cleaned up yet.
A poor fit
Very early-stage spend where the savings would not move the needle, or no one who can grant read-only IAM access. We will say so on day zero rather than waste a week.
What it is not
It is not a commitment or a sales pitch with a pitch deck. We look at the account, we tell you what we find, and you decide what to do with it. If you want us to implement the changes, we quote it. If not, no problem.
Reviewed by people who run AWS at scale
tMinus1 built Automatum — multi-tenant SaaS, metered billing, marketplace integrations across AWS, Azure and GCP. 80+ software companies run their marketplace revenue through it, and we still operate it. We live inside AWS cost optimisation as operators, not consultants who read about it.
We spend an hour or two in your account and learn whether we could be useful to each other. If the findings turn up implementation work you want done, we will quote it. If not, you keep everything and we part on good terms. No fee, no follow-up sequence.
You create an IAM role with read-only permissions on billing, Cost Explorer, and resource metadata. We cannot create, modify or delete anything. No agents are installed. We agree what billing, resource metadata and findings information is needed before starting; application records are outside the review scope. You revoke the role when the review is done.
Almost certainly. Savings Plans cover compute spend at the family level but do not address idle resources, wrong storage classes, data transfer patterns or NAT gateway overuse. Accounts with Savings Plans in place still routinely carry 20–40% in other recoverable spend.
Your technical lead and whoever owns the AWS budget. The findings are specific enough that the budget owner can act on them without translating the technical side. Sixty minutes is typically enough.
You and us. We do not publish your account data, we do not use your name in marketing without written permission, and we will sign your NDA before we start if you need one.
The free review covers one account. Pick the one with the highest spend. A full-organisation review is real work and we quote it as such — typically the free review pays for itself in the first month's savings.
Your AWS bill is higher than it needs to be. Find out by how much.
Name the account. We will confirm within a day whether we can help.
