05 · Method

From a billing export to a lower bill.

Seven levels to work on, four steps to get there, and one optional step when the audit finds bigger work. Nothing changes in production without your team's approval.

Where I work on the bill

Seven levels, from cutting what serves no purpose to deciding where the money goes. Tools and checklists cover the first three. The savings that last sit further down, in architecture, code and steering.

The seven levels I work at, with their levers, effort and timeline
Workstream	Levers	Effort	Timeline
1HygieneCut what serves no purpose	Orphaned volumes and IPs, old snapshots, non-production off at night and at weekends, tags.	Low	Hours to days
2RightsizingFit to real usage	Oversized instances and databases, gp2 to gp3 disks, a move to ARM (Graviton).	Medium	Days to weeks
3CommitmentsPay less for what remains	Savings Plans, reserved instances, Spot for workloads that can take an interruption.	Low	Days
4NegotiationCloud and vendor contracts	Multi-year commitments (EDP, MACC), private pricing, migration credits, licences and SaaS contracts.	Medium	Weeks to months
5ArchitectureChange what generates the bill	Managed or serverless services, autoscaling, caching, outbound traffic, storage lifecycle.	High	Weeks to months
6Code and runtimeRewrite what runs the most	Profile the hot paths, change language where it pays. A C# batch moved to Rust went from 7 h 30 to under 30 s.	High	Months
7CTO steeringDecide where the money goes	Cost per customer or per transaction, the cloud's share of revenue, build or buy, repatriation where it is justified.	High	Quarters
Each level works on what the levels above it left.

How an audit runs

Five steps, from the first call to the bigger work. At step 3, the example bill goes through the seven levels above.

Call and NDADay 0

Free audit48 hours

ChangesYou approve, paid on results

Bigger workOptional, scoped and paid

Follow-upEvery month, 12 months

The audit path: your bill in, the levers out, the follow-up measured every month. The dots and their paces are an illustration.

Call and NDA. A straight answer on fit, then an NDA before any data changes hands.
Free audit. The bill read line by line across the seven levels, delivered in 48 hours.
Changes. Your engineers review and deploy each change you pick; the fee starts only once a saving shows on the bill.
Follow-up. Each month for 12 months, the saving is measured against the baseline at comparable usage.
Bigger work. When the audit finds a redesign or a migration worth doing, it is scoped as a separate project you can accept or not.

01 · Call and NDA

You

Book a call and bring the last bills, or just their totals and your main services.

I tell you whether the offer fits, before any paperwork. If it does, we sign an NDA.

You get

A straight answer on fit, and an NDA before any data changes hands.

What I ask for after the NDA

Read-only access to billing is enough. No access to production at this stage.

AWS: Cost and Usage Report
Azure: Cost Management exports
Google Cloud: Billing export to BigQuery

02 · Free audit

You

Share the billing exports, read-only.

I read the bill line by line across the seven levels, and price each lever with its effort, its risk and what it does to production.

You get

The lever table for engineering and a one-page summary for finance.

Then a call

We walk through both with your CTO and your CFO on the same call, and your team picks what to apply.

Lever tableFor engineering · Illustration

Example of the audit's lever table
Level	Lever	Saving a month	Effort	Risk	Production
1	Schedule test environments	€7,400	1 day	Low	No production change
1	Delete old snapshots and orphaned volumes	€4,900	1 day	Low	No production change
2	Rightsize the main compute group on ARM	€12,600	1 week	Medium	Tested on staging first
3	Three-year commitments on the stable compute	€18,900	2 days	Low	Three-year commitment, stable floor only
4	Negotiate a multi-year discount (EDP)	€9,950	1 week	Medium	No production change
5	Prompt caching and model routing	€6,500	2 weeks	Medium	Quality and latency measured
5	Gateway endpoint for S3, not the NAT	€3,000	1 day	Low	Tested on staging first
6	Incremental export, smaller database	€6,800	1 week	Medium	Tested on staging first
7	Retire the reporting stack nobody opens	€4,200	2 days	Low	Data archived first
	Total	€74,250	32 days		55.0% of the bill

One-page summary, per monthFor finance

Bill€135,000

Savings found€74,250

Fee if applied€14,850

You keep€59,400

03 · Changes

You

Pick the levers to apply. Your engineers review and deploy each change.

I write or drive each change with your teams: the pull request or the configuration, its test, and a way back.

You get

A lower bill without a slower system. The fee starts only once a saving shows on the bill.

Example bill, one monthIllustration

Compute: −€41,100€16,900
Databases: −€9,350€12,650
Storage: −€6,200€9,800
AI models: −€8,000€5,000
Analytics: −€5,250€3,750
Network: −€3,900€4,100
Licences: €5,000
Support and other: −€450€3,550

Total a month€60,750

−55.0%

Saved a month €74,250Fee, 20% of the saving €14,850

The seven levels, in order

04 · Follow-up

You

Keep shipping. Growth in usage is taken into account, not held against you.

Each month I measure the saving against the baseline, at comparable usage, and send the statement.

You get

A monthly statement you can check line by line. After 12 months, every euro saved is yours.

How the saving is measured

The baseline comes from recent bills. Discounts and commitments you already had stay in it, so the fee only covers what changed.

The usage measure is agreed at the start: requests, users or data processed.

Monthly statement · month 3Illustration

Baseline, from recent bills: €135,000
Usage compared with the baseline: 8.0% more
Baseline at this month's usage: €145,800
Actual bill: €71,550
Saving: €74,250
Fee, 20% of the saving: €14,850

+ · Bigger work

You

Decide whether the bigger work is worth it, with the figures in hand.

When the audit finds a redesign or a migration worth doing, I scope it as a separate project: goal, cost, expected saving and plan.

You get

A fixed scope you can accept or not. The levers already found stay paid on results.

When it happens

Levels 5 to 7, when a lever needs more than a setting: a batch rewritten and run in parallel, a platform moved to bare metal through Kubernetes, an AI feature rebuilt around caching and routing.

Client work · EDF Power Solutions · level 6A simulation engine rewritten from C# to Rust.7 h 30 → under 30 scloud cost about halved

If I were FinOps at…Exercises · level 5 levers

AlanLevel 579.6% less$206,200 → $42,200 a month, base scenarioPrompt caching, a router to a smaller model, a local model on GPU.BlaBlaCarLevel 571.8% less$866,000 → $244,000 a month, base scenarioKarpenter bin-packing, scaling down at night, shared load balancers.DoctolibLevel 555.9% less$421,200 → $185,700 a month, base scenarioA read cache, readers that follow the day, cold rows moved to S3.Mistral AILevel 554.2% less$25.95M → $11.88M a month, base scenarioPooled tenants, a small-model tier behind a router, ParallelCluster with FSx.

Exercises built on what each company published, priced at AWS list prices. Not client work: I have no relationship with these companies. The percentage is the base scenario's and covers every lever of the exercise; the levers named here are the level 5 ones.

Nothing is payable until the bill goes down.
Nothing changes without your team's approval.
The audit commits you to nothing.
Discounts you already have sit in the baseline.

Start with the free audit Book a call ↗