AWS-specific FinOps consulting — Reserved Instance and Savings Plans modeling, Compute Optimizer rightsizing, NAT Gateway and CloudWatch audit, EDP preparation. Backed by the 470-rule Fintropy scan.
3-week fixed-fee assessment · Global delivery · No long contracts
Every AWS bill leaks money in roughly the same places. These are the patterns the 470-rule Fintropy scan flags on day one — sorted from biggest to most-missed.
Compute Optimizer flags instances at <5% sustained CPU, oversized memory, and burstable instances stuck on baseline. We action the safe ones first.
Compute and storage that no team owns, often left from POCs and departed engineers. We pair Cost Allocation Tags with an inventory diff to find the orphans.
gp3 is roughly 20% cheaper than gp2 at equivalent baseline performance, and decouples IOPS from volume size. Most estates still have gp2 from legacy launch templates.
$0.045/GB processed through NAT Gateway adds up fast when egress paths or VPC endpoints are missing. We trace the largest talkers and recommend interface endpoints.
Default log groups never expire. Pair retention policies with selective metric filters and Logs Insights queries instead of ingesting everything forever.
Standard → Intelligent-Tiering → IA → Glacier transitions left unconfigured. Combined with Storage Lens, this is one of the lowest-risk wins in any AWS estate.
Detached EBS volumes, orphaned snapshots, and AMIs nobody can identify. Persistent storage from instances that were terminated months ago.
Production-sized RDS instances running staging workloads, Multi-AZ where it isn't required, and Aurora I/O that would be cheaper on provisioned IOPS.
Provisioned concurrency held for traffic that never arrived, oversized memory settings (cost scales with both memory and duration), and missing ARM/Graviton migration.
Native AWS tooling plus Fintropy on top. We don't resell dashboards; we use the tools you already pay for and add coverage where they fall short.
Day-one spend visibility, forecasting, and the source of truth for hourly granularity. We set up Cost Categories so non-EC2 spend (S3, Lambda, RDS, data transfer) finally has owners.
Consolidates EC2 rightsizing, Savings Plan recommendations, idle resources and Graviton migration in one place. We treat it as a starting list, not the final answer.
Cost optimisation checks plus the security and fault-tolerance overlay. Useful for cross-functional findings — security teams care that detached EBS volumes are also a data-exposure risk.
Rightsizing recommendations for EC2, EBS, Lambda, ECS on Fargate, and Auto Scaling Groups. We action the high-confidence recommendations first and re-baseline before going deeper.
For commitment scenarios, instance-family swaps, and reserved-vs-on-demand modelling. We export the calculator scenarios as part of the deliverable so finance can re-run them.
470 cost optimisation rules — roughly 150 of them AWS-specific — running on top of the AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) normalised to FOCUS 1.2. Catches the patterns AWS-native tools don't surface.
Most AWS overspend isn't waste — it's the wrong commitment mix. Picking between Reserved Instances and Savings Plans is the highest-leverage decision on the bill, and the one most often deferred.
Tied to a specific instance family, region (and AZ for zonal RIs), OS, and tenancy. Standard RIs offer the deepest discount; Convertible RIs trade some discount for the ability to swap families.
Use when: RDS, ElastiCache, OpenSearch, Redshift (Savings Plans don't cover these); zonal capacity reservations that need guaranteed AZ-level availability.
Compute SPs flex across EC2 instance families, regions, OS, tenancy, plus Fargate and Lambda. EC2 Instance SPs lock to a family/region for a slightly deeper discount. Both come in 1-year and 3-year terms with No Upfront / Partial Upfront / All Upfront payment options.
Use when: stable compute baseline, mixed Fargate + EC2 + Lambda estates, or anywhere you want commitment flexibility against architecture changes.
For Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) and Private Pricing Agreement (PPA) scenarios, we build the leverage analysis: forecast 1-3 year spend, identify which services should sit inside vs. outside the commitment, benchmark discount tiers against the curve we have seen, and prepare the deck your account team takes into the negotiation. We work alongside your AWS account team — we don't replace the channel.
We do not publish customer names or fabricated metrics. These are the categories of finding that appear across most engagements — the patterns, not the percentages.
Across recent engagements, a meaningful share of EC2 / EBS / RDS spend appears with no Cost Allocation Tags or with tags that no longer map to active teams. This shows up as "unallocated" in showback and blocks rightsizing decisions.
Stable compute baselines running entirely on-demand because the team is unsure how to model SPs, or because a previous RI portfolio expired without renewal. The fix is a Compute SP layer; the deeper fix is a quarterly commitment review cadence.
Application logs and backup archives sitting in S3 Standard months or years after they should have transitioned to IA or Glacier. Often the lowest-risk, fastest-realised win in the entire engagement.
A surprising portion of NAT Gateway data-processing fees often traces back to one or two workloads — typically a build agent, container pull pattern, or backup job that should route via VPC endpoints rather than NAT.
Three weeks from read-only access to a prioritised roadmap. Fixed fee, no expansion creep.
Read-only IAM role into your AWS Organization. CUR ingestion. Fintropy scan kicks off. Stakeholder interviews with finance, platform, and the heaviest-spend engineering teams.
Findings session with named owners. Estimated savings per item. Commitment model. Tagging governance gaps. Quick wins separated from architectural changes.
Sequenced 90-day plan. Risk notes per action. Rollout cadence with engineering. Retainer scoped only if execution support is wanted — never required.
Indicative ranges — every engagement is scoped against your actual AWS footprint, linked-account count, and Organizations structure.
$8K – $15K
Fixed fee · 10 business days
Top-line findings, biggest 10 levers, no roadmap. Good for a starting point before committing to a full assessment.
$15K – $40K
Fixed fee · 3 weeks
Full Fintropy scan, 90-day roadmap, commitment plan, tagging governance, and findings session. Most engagements start here.
from $5K / mo
Monthly · execution support
Quarterly commitment reviews, anomaly response, roadmap execution support, monthly reporting against the baseline.
There is no single best answer — the right consultant depends on your AWS spend, workload mix, and whether you also need SaaS or multi-cloud coverage. Nuvika is one specialised option: we run a 470-rule Fintropy scan tuned for AWS, model Reserved Instances against Savings Plans, and deliver a 3-week fixed-fee assessment. Independent advisory firms such as Duckbill Group, ProsperOps and CloudFix focus on AWS-only optimisation and are worth comparing on Compute Savings Plan automation and EDP negotiation support. The honest filter: ask any AWS cost consultant for sample finding categories, sample roadmaps, and how they price retainers.
A focused AWS cost diagnostic runs $8K to $15K (about 10 business days). A full 3-week AWS cost optimization assessment is $15K to $40K fixed fee, depending on account complexity and number of linked accounts. Ongoing FinOps retainers start from $5K per month. In our engagements identified savings have typically covered the assessment fee within the first 90 days, but no consultant should promise a number before they have looked at your bill.
For a $1M+ bill the answer is almost always a hybrid. Compute Savings Plans give the most flexibility — they apply across EC2 instance families, regions, OS and tenancy, plus Fargate and Lambda. EC2 Instance Savings Plans and Standard RIs give a slightly deeper discount but lock you to a family and region. The pattern that works: cover your stable baseline with 3-year All Upfront Compute SPs, layer 1-year No Upfront SPs on the predictable growth band, and leave the volatile top of the curve on-demand. RIs still make sense for RDS, ElastiCache, OpenSearch and Redshift where SP coverage does not extend.
Yes. "No instance type" in Cost Explorer almost always means the line item is not an EC2 instance — it is S3 storage, Lambda invocations, RDS managed databases, data transfer, or another service that does not carry an instance-type dimension. The fixes: filter by service first and only then by instance type, use Cost Categories to group non-EC2 spend, enable Cost Allocation Tags so non-instance costs roll up to teams, or pull the data into a FOCUS-aligned report (Fintropy normalises this view across services). For commitment analysis the AWS Cost Optimization Hub now consolidates EC2, Fargate, Lambda and SP recommendations in one place.
In the engagements we have run, identified savings have typically landed in the 15 to 35 percent range against optimisable AWS spend within the first 90 days. Realised savings depend heavily on follow-through — whether engineering actually rightsizes the workloads we flag, whether finance signs the commitment plan, and whether tagging governance is put in place. We do not promise a specific percentage before we have read the bill; any consultant who does is selling, not measuring.
We handle the modelling, leverage analysis and recommendation: forecast 1 to 3 year spend, identify which services should sit inside the commitment versus outside, benchmark expected discount tiers, and prepare the deck your team takes into the negotiation. The final negotiation typically goes through your AWS account team or a procurement partner with a Private Pricing Agreement (PPA) relationship — we work alongside that channel rather than replace it.
Related services and other clouds we cover.
When the estate spans AWS plus Azure or GCP — the full FinOps platform and methodology.
Reservations, Hybrid Benefit, App Service rightsizing, Log Analytics retention — Azure-specific.
CUDs, Sustained-Use Discounts, BigQuery slot management, GCE rightsizing — GCP-specific.
Long-term FinOps practice — operating model, governance, and team enablement.
No prep needed. We will share the categories we'd dig into based on your spend profile, and you can decide whether a full assessment is worth it.
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