Your AWS bill, line by line.
The savings in six weeks.
If the bill grew faster than the business and nobody can say who owns which line, the cloud is not the problem. The missing owner is. We find the waste in two weeks, remove it in six, and measure the savings on your own bill.
Two-week analysis, $25,000. Six-week optimization, $35,000, with half the fee invoiced only if the savings reach three times it. One signature, no procurement cycle.
Find the savings, or bank them too.
Both fixed price.
Fixed scope, fixed price, one signature.
Both start within two weeks of it.
The Analysis
Your whole bill, traced to what runs it. We baseline twelve months of spend, measure every resource against its actual use, and rank every saving by what it is worth, what it takes, and what it risks.
- Twelve months of spend by account, service, environment, and team
- A waste register: idle and orphaned resources, each with its owner and monthly cost
- Rightsizing and commitment plans sized to what you actually use
- An architecture review of data transfer, storage, and logging
- A savings roadmap you can run yourselves, or with us
Charles’s time: up to 40 hours over the two weeks, about 8 of them live with your team.
Read-only, start to finish. Billing and configuration are read through a role you deploy and delete; nothing in your accounts changes during the Analysis.
Ask about the AnalysisThe Optimization
The Analysis in the first two weeks. Then weeks three through five put the savings in place through your own change process, with the engineers who own each workload. Week six measures every change on your bill.
- Everything in the Analysis
- Waste removed, after each owner signs off
- Rightsizing applied, non-production first, each change with its rollback
- Commitments sized to your steady state, approved and purchased by you
- Budgets, anomaly alerts, tag policies, and showback that keep the bill down
- Every change’s savings measured on your Cost and Usage Report at week six
Charles’s time: up to 110 hours over the six weeks, about 38 of them live with your team.
The guarantee. The second half of the fee is invoiced only if the savings in place at week six, measured on your bill and annualized, are at least three times the fee. If the Analysis cannot find that much, we say so at week two, and you stop there and pay only for the Analysis.
No share of your savings, ever. And no standing access to production: every change goes through your pull requests and your pipeline.
Ask about the OptimizationWeek by week
Because the work has a shape.
The same weeks, every time, which is why it is fixed price.
- Week 1Baseline and inventory.Billing access and your Cost and Usage Report on day one. Twelve months of spend broken down by account, service, environment, and team; every resource measured against its actual use; and the walkthroughs with your platform team and whoever owns the bill.
- Week 2Find and rank.The waste register, the rightsizing and commitment plans, and the architecture review, each opportunity with its evidence and its estimate. Then a readout with the sponsor: the baseline, the savings ranked, and what six weeks would put in place.
- Week 1Baseline and inventory.The Analysis’s first week: billing access, twelve months of spend, and every resource against its actual use. No changes yet. This is the bill everything is measured against.
- Week 2Find and rank.The Analysis’s second week: the ranked savings roadmap, agreed with your sponsor. If it does not add up to at least three times the Optimization’s fee, we say so here, and you can stop with the Analysis.
- Week 3Quick wins.Waste removed after each owner signs off, with a snapshot kept wherever something could be wanted again. Non-production put on a schedule, and lifecycle policies on the largest buckets. The money that was leaking stops first.
- Week 4Rightsizing and commitments.Compute, databases, and containers resized to measured use, non-production first, then production through your change process. Then Savings Plans and reservations sized to what is left, approved by finance and bought in your account.
- Week 5Architecture and guardrails.Data transfer and NAT charges cut where the design allows. Then budgets and anomaly alerts routed to each owner, tag policies that enforce allocation, and a showback report per team, so the bill stays down after we leave.
- Week 6Measure and hand over.Every change’s savings measured on your Cost and Usage Report and annualized. You get the number, the playbook, and a monthly review your team already knows how to run.
What you hold at the end.
Every deliverable is an artifact in your repositories or your inbox.
None of them is a promise in a deck.
- 01The spend baseline.Twelve months of spend by account, service, environment, and team, with the forecast, the fastest-growing lines, and the share of the bill nobody can attribute.
- 02The waste register.Idle and orphaned resources, each with its resource ID, its owner, and what it costs a month: unattached volumes, idle load balancers, stale snapshots, forgotten environments.
- 03The rightsizing plan.Compute, databases, and containers sized to their measured use, with newer instance generations and Graviton where they fit.
- 04The commitment plan.Savings Plans and reservations sized to your steady state, each with its term, its payment option, and its break-even.
- 05The architecture review.Data transfer and NAT gateway charges, storage tiers and lifecycle, logging volume, and the design changes that cost less by construction.
- 06The savings roadmap.Every opportunity ranked by annual savings, effort, and risk, with the evidence behind each estimate. It is the Optimization’s plan customized to you, and it is what you run yourselves if you stop here.
- 07The sponsor readout.A short written document, presented in the closing meeting.
- 08Waste removed,each item after its owner signs off, with a snapshot or backup kept wherever something could be wanted again.
- 09Rightsizing applied,non-production first, then production through your change process, every change with its rollback.
- 10Commitments in place:Savings Plans and reservations sized to the steady state, approved by your finance lead and purchased in your account.
- 11Storage and data transfer fixed:lifecycle policies and tiers on the largest buckets and volumes, and endpoints where NAT gateway charges justify them.
- 12Non-production on a schedule,off nights and weekends wherever nobody uses it.
- 13Guardrails that keep it:budgets and cost anomaly alerts routed to each owner, tag policies that enforce allocation, and a monthly showback report per team.
- 14The week-six savings measurement,change by change on your Cost and Usage Report, annualized. It is the document that decides the second invoice.
- 15The handover workshop,its recording, and the monthly cost review your team runs from then on.
How much of Charles you get.
Fixed price does not mean unbounded.
The cap is in the statement of work, and so is what we need from you.
Over two weeks. About 8 of them are live with your team; the rest are the baseline, the measurement, the roadmap, and the agents doing the line-by-line work under Charles’s supervision.
Over six weeks, roughly 18 hours a week. About 38 of them are live with your team: the change reviews, the pairing, the commitment decision, the office hours, and the readouts.
By written change order, agreed before the hour is spent. Remote by default; an on-site day is priced separately.
- One AWS organization’s bill, up to 50 accounts, at $50,000 a month or more
- Any mix of compute, containers, databases, storage, and data services on it
- Changes in up to four infrastructure-as-code repositories, in the tool you already use
- Billing read access and a view-only role in every in-scope account within three business days of signature, from a CloudFormation template we hand you. The clock starts when it exists.
- Your Cost and Usage Report and Compute Optimizer on, or turned on at kickoff; we hand you the settings
- An owner for each account or workload who can say yes to a change, the sponsor for thirty minutes a week, and whoever approves commitments for the week-four decision
The rooms Charles leads.
Every meeting is on the calendar before week one.
Nothing else is asked of your engineers except the reviews and the pairing.
- Kickoff60 minutes
Sponsor, platform lead, and whoever owns the bill. Scope, access, the Cost and Usage Report, and what happens in the two weeks.
- Architecture walkthrough90 minutes, platform team
The workloads behind the biggest lines on the bill, told by the people who run them.
- Finance session45 minutes
Budgets, commitments already bought, how costs are allocated today, and what the board has asked.
- Office hours30 minutes, twice a week
Drop-in while the bill is baselined and the resources are measured.
- Savings review90 minutes, end of week two
Every opportunity with the engineers who own it: the evidence, the risk, and the estimate.
- Sponsor readout60 minutes, end of week two
The baseline, the savings ranked, and what six weeks would put in place.
Weeks one and two are the Analysis’s: the kickoff, the walkthrough, the finance session, office hours, and the savings review. Then:
- Sponsor check-in30 minutes, weekly
Savings in place so far, what changed this week, what is waiting on a decision.
- Change review60 minutes, twice a week, weeks three through five
Every change read with its owner before it ships, with its rollback.
- Pairing60 to 90 minutes, two or three times a week
Rightsizing, storage, scheduling, and architecture changes, made with the engineer who owns the workload. This is where the teaching actually happens.
- Commitment decision60 minutes, week four
Finance and the sponsor approve the Savings Plans and reservations, with the break-even of each.
- Office hours45 minutes, twice a week
Drop-in, weeks three through six.
- Week sixabout 5 hours across the week
The savings measurement, a 2-hour handover workshop on keeping the bill down, and the closing sponsor readout.
The tools of the engagement.
Nothing exotic, and nothing you have to buy.
Everything the engagement produces is recorded, transcribed, and left with you.
The billing role
Billing read access and a view-only role in every account, from a CloudFormation template you read before you deploy it and delete when we finish. Nothing in your accounts changes during the Analysis.
AWS’s own cost data
Your Cost and Usage Report, with Cost Explorer, Compute Optimizer, and Cost Optimization Hub, read through the billing role. The same report measures the savings at week six.
Your repositories and pipeline
Every change is code in your infrastructure repositories, merged through your pull requests and applied by your pipeline. Commitments are bought by your finance lead, in your account. We never hold standing write access to production.
Zoom
Every session is held on Zoom and recorded with your permission, with Zoom’s transcripts and recaps delivered alongside each recording, so the people who were not in the room get the whole meeting.
Pavilion
Set up for your engagement in week one: the calendar, every recording with its transcript and summary, the roadmap and the savings measurement your sponsor accepts, the decisions, and the action items, in one place you keep afterward.
Scheduling, approvals, change orders, and invoices go by email, so the commercial record of the engagement is in your inbox, not in a portal you lose access to.
Who this is for
- A CTO, CFO, VP of Engineering, or head of platform with an AWS bill of $50,000 a month or more
- A bill that grew faster than revenue, or a board that asked why
- Tags that cover part of the bill, and no owner for the rest
- Budget authority for a fixed-price engagement without a procurement cycle
Who it is not for
- Bills under $50,000 a month, where the fee is too large a share of what there is to save
- Teams that want a dashboard. Dashboards show the waste; this removes it.
- Anyone who wants savings at the expense of reliability. Nothing your service levels depend on is cut to hit a number.
The receipts
Cost is an architecture decision before it is a line on a bill.
Client names withheld per NDA.
Who does the work
Charles Sieg. AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional and DevOps Engineer — Professional. Cloud architect and platform engineer for Fortune 1000 clients across healthcare, pharma, and financial services, on AWS bills from $20,000 to more than $300,000 a month. Both engagements are delivered by Charles personally, inside your accounts, with your engineers.
Questions a CFO asks first
Why not a percentage of the savings?
Because a percentage rewards cutting, not cutting well, and it keeps billing you for work that was done once. A fixed price, with half of the Optimization’s fee riding on the result, puts us on your side without either problem.
What if you do not find enough to be worth it?
Then we say so at the week-two readout. If the Analysis does not find savings of at least three times the Optimization’s fee, you can stop there and pay only for the Analysis.
Will anything get slower or less reliable?
Not on purpose, and not without your say. Every change is reviewed with the engineer who owns the workload, made in non-production first, shipped through your change process, and carries its rollback. Nothing your service levels depend on is cut to hit a number.
Do you buy Savings Plans or reservations for us?
No. We size them and show the break-even of each, and your finance lead approves and buys them in your account. Nobody commits your money but you.
How are the savings measured?
Change by change, on your own Cost and Usage Report: what each changed resource or commitment cost per day before the change, against after it, annualized. Not a model of what the bill might have been.
What access do you need?
Billing read access and a view-only role in each account, from a CloudFormation template you read before you deploy it. In the Optimization, every change goes through your pull requests and your pipeline; we never hold standing write access to production.
Our bill is under $50,000 a month. Should we still talk?
Probably not about this engagement: below that, the fee is too large a share of what there is to save. Email us anyway, and we will point you at what to do yourselves.
How much of Charles’s time do we actually get?
Up to 40 hours in the Analysis and up to 110 in the Optimization, with about 8 and 38 of those hours live with your team. The caps are written into the statement of work. Anything beyond them is a written change order at $450 per hour, agreed before the hour is spent.
Two more fixed-price engagements.
Same two shapes, same two prices.
Two weeks and $25,000 for the diagnostic, six weeks and $35,000 for the result.
Engineering Leverage
Your board asked what the company is getting from Claude Code, and the honest answer is faster autocomplete.
Read the engagement
AWS Security, Compliance & Governance Audit
An audit is coming, a customer sent a security questionnaire, or nobody can say for certain who can reach production.
Read the engagementStart with an email.
Tell us roughly what the bill is, how many accounts it spans, and what prompted the question. You will hear back from Charles within one business day, and the first call is thirty minutes.
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