AWS cost · Fixed price

A smaller AWS bill.
A fee it can pay back.

Find the waste, put the savings in place, and verify them on your own bill. The six-week engagement costs $35,000. Its result condition is at least $105,000 in annualized AWS savings.

Book a 15-minute intro call See the return on the fee Download the AWS Cost Optimization brief (PDF, 7 pages, 161 KB)

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.

A canal lock at blue hour, massive steel gates holding back still water, one amber lamp on the lock wall.

At the threshold,
the fee earns itself back.

The Optimization’s acceptance condition is at least three times the full fee in annualized savings. Here is what that means over time.

AWS Cost Optimization

Recover the fee.
Keep the savings.

At the acceptance threshold

The six-week result condition is at least $105,000 in annualized savings. At that rate, the full fee is recovered in four months.

$8,750AWS savings per month
4 monthsto recover the full fee
Cumulative AWS savings versus the $35,000 fee$8,750 per month yields $105,000 over twelve months after week six. Benefit equals the full fee in 4.0 months.$0$75,000$150,000036912Months after the week-six measurement$35,000 fee4.0 months
Cumulative AWS savings$35,000 fee
Savings over 12 months after measurement$105,000

$8,750 saved each month × 12 = $105,000. That is 3× the $35,000 engagement fee. No percentage of your savings.

Model your monthly savings

Enter dollars with or without commas. The engagement is designed for AWS bills of $50,000 per month or more. Actual savings are verified on your Cost and Usage Report.

Four months begins once the savings are fully in place, after the six-week engagement. It assumes they persist. Annualized savings are a run rate, not savings already banked; workload, usage, and commitment costs affect the result.

Explore AWS Cost Optimization
View chart data and formula

Cumulative savings = measured monthly AWS savings × months after week six. Fee recovery = $35,000 ÷ positive monthly savings. The second half of the fee requires at least $105,000 in annualized savings at week six. If the Analysis finds less, the existing stop-at-week-two terms apply.

Cumulative AWS savings after week six
MonthSavingsFee
0$0$35,000
3$26,250$35,000
6$52,500$35,000
9$78,750$35,000
12$105,000$35,000

Six weeks to install and measure. Then the return accumulates. The charts start after the week-six measurement and assume the monthly benefit holds. They compare cumulative benefit with the full $35,000 fee, before taxes and financing. Your team’s time during the engagement is additional.

See the scope and result conditions
2
Weeks to a ranked savings plan
6
Weeks to savings in place, measured
3×
The fee in annual savings, or half is not invoiced
0%
Of your savings, ever

Find the savings, or bank them too.
Both fixed price.

Fixed scope, fixed price, one signature.
Both start within two weeks of it.

Two weeks

The Analysis

$25,000

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.

Guaranteed
Six weeks

The Optimization

$35,000

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 unless we both agree to continue, the engagement stops there: you pay the Analysis fee, with the half paid at signature credited against it.

No share of your savings, ever. And no standing access to production: every change goes through your pull requests and your pipeline.

Week by week

Because the work has a shape.
The same weeks, every time, which is why it is fixed price.

The Analysis · two weeks · $25,000
  1. Week 1
    Baseline 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.
  2. Week 2
    Find 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.
The Optimization · six weeks · $35,000
  1. Week 1
    Baseline 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.
  2. Week 2
    Find 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 unless we both agree to continue, the engagement stops with the Analysis.
  3. Week 3
    Quick 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.
  4. Week 4
    Rightsizing 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.
  5. Week 5
    Architecture 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.
  6. Week 6
    Measure 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.

The Analysis · seven deliverables
  1. 01
    The 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.
  2. 02
    The 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.
  3. 03
    The rightsizing plan.Compute, databases, and containers sized to their measured use, with newer instance generations and Graviton where they fit.
  4. 04
    The commitment plan.Savings Plans and reservations sized to your steady state, each with its term, its payment option, and its break-even.
  5. 05
    The architecture review.Data transfer and NAT gateway charges, storage tiers and lifecycle, logging volume, and the design changes that cost less by construction.
  6. 06
    The 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.
  7. 07
    The sponsor readout.A short written document, presented in the closing meeting.
The Optimization · everything in the Analysis, then eight more
  1. 08
    Waste removed,each item after its owner signs off, with a snapshot or backup kept wherever something could be wanted again.
  2. 09
    Rightsizing applied,non-production first, then production through your change process, every change with its rollback.
  3. 10
    Commitments in place:Savings Plans and reservations sized to the steady state, approved by your finance lead and purchased in your account.
  4. 11
    Storage and data transfer fixed:lifecycle policies and tiers on the largest buckets and volumes, and endpoints where NAT gateway charges justify them.
  5. 12
    Non-production on a schedule,off nights and weekends wherever nobody uses it.
  6. 13
    Guardrails that keep it:budgets and cost anomaly alerts routed to each owner, tag policies that enforce allocation, and a monthly showback report per team.
  7. 14
    The week-six savings measurement,change by change on your Cost and Usage Report, annualized. It is the document that decides the second invoice.
  8. 15
    The handover workshop,its recording, and the monthly cost review your team runs from then on.
A row of low autonomous mobile robots parked at their charging docks down a long warehouse aisle at blue hour, amber lamps glowing on the nearest machines.
Sample case study · every deliverable, downloadable

StrataForge Robotics: the Optimization, start to finish

A fictional robot maker with a $55.7 million AWS bill: $23.5 million a year identified, $11.1 million put in place, and $9.4 million measured on its own Cost and Usage Report. Every week, the Pavilion workspace, and all eight reports.

Read the sample case study

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.

The Analysis
Up to 40 hours

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.

The Optimization
Up to 110 hours

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.

Beyond the cap
$450 per hour

By written change order, agreed before the hour is spent. Remote by default; an on-site day is priced separately.

Scope
  • 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
What we need from you
  • 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.

The Analysis · about 8 live hours
  • 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.

The Optimization · about 38 live hours

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 access

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.

The instruments

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.

Where the changes land

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.

Meetings, recorded

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.

The workspace

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.

The paper trail

Email

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.
How this differs from an AWS Well-Architected Review

Not a six-pillar survey.
A forensic pass on the bill.

An AWS Well-Architected Framework Review evaluates a single workload across six architectural pillars, with Cost Optimization as one qualitative conversation among six. This engagement starts from your twelve-month Cost and Usage Report across your entire AWS organization, prices every finding to the dollar, puts the changes in place, and guarantees the result on your bill.

Standard AWS Well-Architected Review

One workload, six pillars, qualitative questions

A structured architectural review of a single workload against Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability in the AWS Well-Architected Tool.

  • Scoped to one defined workload rather than your whole AWS organization’s bill
  • Cost Optimization is one of six pillars, evaluated through best-practice interview questions
  • Produces a High- and Medium-Risk Issue checklist without line-by-line dollar estimates or commitment break-evens
  • Typically ends at the advisory report, leaving implementation and verification to your team
Vantalect Analysis & Optimization

Your whole bill, measured and reduced in six weeks

A forensic financial and engineering engagement across up to 50 accounts, anchored in your twelve-month Cost and Usage Report and Compute Optimizer telemetry, with code changes shipped in weeks three through five.

  • Covers your entire AWS organization (up to 50 accounts) on bills of $50,000 a month or more
  • Every idle resource, rightsizing change, and Savings Plan or reservation is priced with its exact break-even
  • Weeks three through five remove the waste, rightsize resources, and wire up budgets and anomaly alerts via pull requests
  • Half the $35,000 Optimization fee is invoiced only if verified annualized savings reach at least 3× the fee
Primary objective
Standard AWS WAFR Broad architectural health across all 6 AWS pillars
Vantalect Cost Analysis & Optimization Measurable, recurring dollar reduction on your monthly AWS bill
Unit of scope
Standard AWS WAFR A single defined application or workload
Vantalect Cost Analysis & Optimization One AWS organization’s entire bill, up to 50 accounts
Primary data source
Standard AWS WAFR Architect and team interview against the AWS WAFR questionnaire
Vantalect Cost Analysis & Optimization 12 months of Cost and Usage Report (CUR) line items, Compute Optimizer, and live resource utilization
Implementation
Standard AWS WAFR Advisory HRI report; remediation scoped separately
Vantalect Cost Analysis & Optimization Weeks 3–5 execute waste removal, rightsizing, storage tiers, NAT cuts, and FinOps guardrails via PRs
Financial accountability
Standard AWS WAFR No savings target; measured by HRI counts closed
Vantalect Cost Analysis & Optimization 3× fee ($105,000/yr) in verified CUR savings, or the second half of the fee is not invoiced
Need a six-pillar workload review instead?

When you actually want an AWS Well-Architected Framework Review.

If your goal is to evaluate one critical production workload across all six pillars — reliability, security, operational excellence, performance efficiency, cost, and sustainability together — and close every High-Risk Issue in the AWS Well-Architected Tool, we deliver that as its own fixed-price engagement: the AWS Well-Architected Framework Review.

The receipts

Cost is an architecture decision before it is a line on a bill.
Client names withheld per NDA.

$300K+
of monthly AWS spend carried by the largest multi-account, multi-region architectures we have designed
See it on the site
$20K–$300K
monthly budgets we have optimized and right-sized, from single accounts to multi-region organizations
See it on the site
2 regions
in a hospitality platform’s migration plan, at an expected monthly cost below its current AWS bill
See it on the site
50+
client engagements across ten industries, remote and nationwide since 2020
See it on the site

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, the engagement stops there unless we both agree to continue, and you pay only the Analysis fee, with the half paid at signature credited against it.

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.

Three 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.

A hydroelectric turbine hall at night, massive steel casings receding along a polished floor with an amber stripe.
AI-native engineering

Engineering Leverage

Your board asked what the company is getting from Claude Code, and the honest answer is faster autocomplete.

Read the engagement
An air traffic control tower at blue hour, its glass cab glowing amber above rows of blue taxiway lights.
AWS security · compliance · governance

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 engagement
A wet walkway beneath twin bridge decks at blue hour, rows of massive concrete piers receding over still dark water, lit by one amber lamp.
AWS architecture · Six pillars

AWS Well-Architected Framework Review

A critical production workload has grown under deadline pressure, and nobody has reviewed its reliability, security, performance, and cost together.

Read the engagement
Compare all four engagements

Start with a short call.

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 fifteen minutes.

Book a 15-minute intro callOr email charles.sieg@vantalect.com

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