# AWS cost optimisation > Cloud bills creep. I trace every dollar to what it pays for, take back the waste first, then redesign what's expensive by design, with the platform running throughout. - A service of Cloudless Labs (Sydney), founded by Nicolas Dao (https://nicolasdao.com) - How it starts: a free 30-minute call to talk through a project: email nic@cloudlesslabs.com; then a written proposal with a fixed price for each piece of work - Web page: https://cloudlesslabs.com/services/aws-cost-optimisation/ ## What we do - **The audit**: Every line of the bill traced to the service, the resource and the business feature behind it. On most bills, a handful of lines carry most of the cost. - **Waste first**: Resources nobody uses, data nobody reads, capacity nobody needs at 3 am. The fastest money, and the least risky. - **Redesign what's expensive**: Always-on servers become serverless, chatty services stop paying per message, logs go where they're cheap to keep, data moves to storage priced for how often it's read. - **Commit last**: Savings Plans and reservations once the architecture has stopped moving, so the commitment matches what's really used. ## Who it's for Companies whose AWS bill grew faster than their business, and who can't say exactly what they're paying for. The bigger and older the platform, the more is usually there to take back. ## What to expect The headline project here is a target, and I state it as one: an agtech platform paying about US$240,000 a year to AWS, on a programme to take it under US$40,000 for the same workload. The work is in progress, and each stage is shipped and measured on the next bill before the next one starts, so the business sees the savings land, month after month, with the platform running throughout. A cut of that size isn't a trick. It's what happens when a platform designed for a server is redesigned for the cloud it runs on. The usual suspects: an oversized database, servers running all night for traffic that only comes by day, [logs nobody reads that cost more than the app](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/guides/chatty-logs/index.md), and services bought for one experiment and never turned off. The traps behind them are in [The Stack's gotchas](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/gotchas/index.md). ## What it costs The first call is free, and so is the written proposal that follows it. The proposal breaks the work into pieces, each with a fixed price set from its scope: what gets built, the systems it touches, and the risk in changing them. You approve each piece before it starts, and the price doesn't move once it's agreed. That's our default, not a rule: if a retainer or hourly billing suits your project better, we'll work that way. ## How an engagement works 1. **A free 30-minute call.** What you spend, what's changed, and what the business runs on. 2. **A written proposal with a fixed price.** For the audit first, so you know where the money goes before anything changes. 3. **The cuts, stage by stage.** Each one shipped, then measured on the next bill. 4. **It stays cut.** Budgets, alerts and the architecture documented, so the bill doesn't creep back. ## Questions **Will the platform go down?** No. Every change is made live, the way I migrate platforms: in parallel first, then switched. **How do you bill a cost optimisation?** By default, a fixed price for each piece of work, agreed before it starts, whatever the cost optimization saves. A retainer or hourly billing is possible if it suits you better. ## See it in practice - [Cutting an AWS bill from US$240k a year to under US$40k](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/aws-bill-cut/index.md): An Australian agriculture-technology company with a large IoT sensor network. An agtech platform was paying about US$240,000 a year for AWS. The programme under way takes it under US$40,000: roughly US$200,000 a year back in the business, for the same workload. - [Off a fragile VPS and onto AWS, with almost no downtime](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/vps-to-aws/index.md): An Australian agriculture-technology company with a large IoT sensor network. A growing agtech platform ran on a single server that could neither scale nor be secured. I moved all of it to AWS, live, with almost no downtime: AWS in front of the devices first, then both systems running in parallel, then a cut-over that lost no data. - [From legacy ASP.NET and stored procedures to Node.js on serverless](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/dotnet-to-serverless/index.md): An Australian agriculture-technology company with a large IoT sensor network. A legacy stack of ASP.NET, C# and slow SQL stored procedures, modernised into Node.js on serverless AWS: faster, cheaper to run, and something a modern team can work on. - [Technology due diligence and integration after an acquisition](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/acquisition-due-diligence/index.md): Acquiring companies, after an acquisition. When a company buys another, it buys its technology too, often undocumented. I reverse-engineer the inherited systems, document their architecture, dependencies and costs, and plan how to modernise, consolidate and integrate them. One engagement delivered, a second under way. ## Related - [Every service](https://cloudlesslabs.com/services/index.md) - [Contact](https://cloudlesslabs.com/contact/index.md) - [How we work](https://cloudlesslabs.com/about/how-we-work/index.md) - [Map of every Markdown file on cloudlesslabs.com, with what each one answers](https://ask.cloudlesslabs.com)