A tenth of the cloud bill, and nothing lost

Situation. An international client was carrying badly bloated infrastructure costs. Their AWS setup had been over‑provisioned and had collected services they no longer used, so the cloud bill had drifted completely out of proportion to what the business actually needed. It’s a common story — nobody sets out to overspend, it just accretes when no one’s watching the meter.

Task. The engagement was to cut the costs substantially without losing any productivity, which meant rethinking the infrastructure properly rather than trimming round the edges — edge‑trimming rarely moves a bill that’s structurally too big.

Action. So the work went end to end. First came an audit of what was actually being used — which is where the duplicated and unnecessary services show themselves — and those got cut. Then whatever was left was right‑sized to match real demand instead of the worst‑case guesses the original setup had been built on. And the big move was relocating the workloads off AWS entirely, onto a more cost‑effective hosting arrangement — done carefully, in stages, so the running business never felt the migration happening underneath it.

Result. The budget costs fell roughly ten‑fold, with zero loss in productivity — the same capability at a fraction of what they’d been paying. It freed up a real amount of money that had quietly been leaking into an oversized cloud bill month after month, which for the business was money straight back to the bottom line.