Your AWS bill, audited finding by finding. A written report in two weeks.
For small and mid-size companies running on AWS with no one whose job is the cloud bill. If waste is sitting in your accounts, this audit finds it, prices it, and tells you what to do first.
Book a 20-minute fit callCloud cost drifts when nobody owns it
Most small and mid-size companies on AWS do not have a cost problem because someone made a bad decision. They have one because cost questions fall between engineering and finance, and no named person is responsible for the bill. The symptoms are usually these four:
- The bill grows faster than usageSpend climbs month after month while the product and the customer count grow much more slowly.
- Idle and orphaned resources nobody ownsStopped projects, old test environments, unattached storage and forgotten instances keep billing quietly.
- Commitment decisions keep slippingSavings Plans and reserved capacity could cut the compute bill, but nobody has the time to size them, so renewals pass undecided.
- No named owner for cloud costWhen the invoice surprises you, there is no one person who can explain, line by line, where the money went.
Start with the audit
One named engagement, a fixed fee, a fixed timeline, and a written result you can act on with your own team or with any engineer you choose.
The AWS Cloud and Cost Audit
$2,500 to $5,000 fixed fee, set by account complexity, agreed before work starts. Two weeks, start to finish.
A senior architect reviews your AWS accounts the way an owner would want them reviewed: where the money goes, what can be cut, and what needs attention before it becomes expensive. You receive four things, in writing:
- Written findings reportEvery finding ranked by cost impact and risk, in plain language.
- Cost reduction listEach item with a dollar estimate per finding, so you can see what each change is worth before you make it.
- 90-day action planSequenced over 30, 60 and 90 days, with effort estimates, so your team knows what to do first.
- Walkthrough callWe go through the report together and answer your questions, finding by finding.
The report is yours to keep, whoever implements the findings.
If the audit finds little Then the report says so, plainly, and you still receive the full findings and the 90-day plan. Two protections come first: the fit call screens out accounts where meaningful savings are unlikely, and every estimate is counted conservatively, at the lower bound, recurring savings only.
One finding, worked in full
This is the format every finding in the report follows: the evidence, the math, the assumptions, and what it would take to act on it.
Idle databases and unattached storage from a retired staging environment
Two RDS database instances show zero connections across 30 days of CloudWatch metrics. Fourteen EBS volumes, 1,400 GB in total, are attached to nothing and show no read or write activity in the same period. All of them carry tags from a staging environment the team believes was shut down last year.
- 2 database instances at an assumed $0.35 per hour each, running 24 hours a day: $511.00 per month
- 1,400 GB of unattached storage at an assumed $0.08 per GB per month: $112.00 per month
- Total: $623.00 per month, or $7,476 per year
On-demand pricing in a US region, instances running around the clock, storage priced at the standard general-purpose SSD rate. Your report prices your findings at your actual rates and usage; the figures here are illustrative.
High. Thirty days of zero connections and zero storage activity is strong evidence, and the tagging points to a retired environment.
About two hours of engineering time: take final snapshots, stop the instances, and confirm with the team before anything is deleted.
Low. The one real risk is that a quiet instance is a seasonal or failover resource. The safeguard: snapshot everything, stop rather than delete, and hold for 14 days. If anything is missed, the instances restart in minutes. After deletion, snapshots are kept for 90 days, so the data can still be restored.
Snapshot, stop, hold 14 days, then terminate the instances and delete the volumes. Expected result at the assumed rates: $623 per month back.
What the audit needs to find to pay for itself
No client numbers are used on this page. The tables below are simple arithmetic at the stated assumptions, so you can judge the engagement against your own bill.
| Your monthly AWS spend | Savings at 10% | Annual savings | Audit fee | Payback period |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $5,000 per month | $500 per month | $6,000 | $2,500 | 5 months |
| $10,000 per month | $1,000 per month | $12,000 | $2,500 | 2.5 months |
| $25,000 per month | $2,500 per month | $30,000 | $5,000 | 2 months |
| $50,000 per month | $5,000 per month | $60,000 | $5,000 | 1 month |
At 5 percent savings
| Your monthly AWS spend | Savings at 5% | Annual savings | Audit fee | Payback period |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $5,000 per month | $250 per month | $3,000 | $2,500 | 10 months |
| $10,000 per month | $500 per month | $6,000 | $2,500 | 5 months |
| $25,000 per month | $1,250 per month | $15,000 | $5,000 | 4 months |
| $50,000 per month | $2,500 per month | $30,000 | $5,000 | 2 months |
Assumptions, stated plainly: the tables show savings at 5 percent and at 10 percent of your monthly spend. The 5 percent table is the conservative case, and the 10 percent table is the higher scenario. The identified savings are then implemented. The fee shown is the fixed fee for accounts of that complexity. Payback period is the fee divided by the monthly savings.
Three times the fee, or the fee is refunded
If the audit does not identify recurring annual savings of at least three times its fee, the fee is refunded. Identified savings are priced at your actual rates, lower bound, as described in the FAQ.
Five steps, two weeks
The whole engagement runs in two weeks and asks very little of your team.
- Step 1: The fit callA 20-minute call about your accounts, your spend, and what you want from the audit. If the audit is not likely to pay for itself at your spend level, you will be told on this call, before you commit to anything.
- Step 2: Read-only access grantedYou create a read-only role in your AWS accounts using the exact policy we send you first, so you can review every permission before it exists. Nothing else about your accounts changes.
- Step 3: The analysisYour billing data, resource configuration and usage patterns are reviewed across compute, storage, databases, networking and discount coverage, and every candidate finding is priced.
- Step 4: The report and walkthroughYou receive the written findings report, the cost reduction list and the 90-day action plan, and we walk through them together on a call.
- Step 5: Optional implementation helpYour team can implement the findings, or you can engage help to do it. Either way the report is yours, and there is no obligation attached to it.
Your time commitment: about 2 hours in total. The fit call, a short access setup, and the walkthrough call. Everything else happens on our side.
Read-only means read-only
The audit needs to see your accounts, not touch them. Access is a read-only IAM role that you create, with the exact policy shared with you before anything is granted.
What the role can see
- Billing data: cost and usage reports, Cost Explorer figures, invoices
- Resource configuration: instance types, storage, networking setup, tags
- Usage metrics: utilization and activity levels from CloudWatch
- Discount coverage: Savings Plans and reserved capacity against actual use
- Account structure: accounts, regions and services in use
What the role cannot do
- It cannot change, stop, resize or delete anything
- It cannot buy anything: no Savings Plans, no reservations, no marketplace purchases
- It cannot create users, keys or new access of any kind
- It does not include your application data or your customer data, and the audit does not ask for them
- It cannot be used by anyone else: access is for the principal only, for the audit only
Nothing changes in production during an audit. The work is analysis only. When the report is delivered, you delete the role and access ends; we confirm the end of access in writing. An NDA is available on request, before any access is granted. Billing exports and working notes are deleted 30 days after delivery.
Meet the principal
Dr. Primus Vekuh founded Primus Cloud Solutions and does the work on every engagement personally. When you book the audit, he is the person who reviews your accounts, writes your report and sits on your walkthrough call. There are no account managers and no junior staff, and nothing is handed off.
His background is senior cloud architecture work, including senior cloud architect roles at global consulting firms, across migration, DevOps, security and AI workloads. He holds a PhD in Information Technology from the University of the Cumberlands (2024), and his doctoral research studied exactly the companies this practice serves: how small and mid-size companies adopt cloud computing, and what that adoption does to their costs, their users and their performance.
Three findings from that research shape how this practice works. First, the decision turns on trust, not technology: companies adopted cloud when they trusted the people and the process behind it, not because a feature list won. Second, preparation predicted performance: the companies that prepared before adopting got the gains, and the ones that bought first and prepared later did not. Third, the software was the easy part: the hard parts were the decisions around it, who owns the system, what it costs month to month, and how people work differently once it is in place.
The dissertation is published and public: Analyzing the Impact of Cloud Computing in SMEs: A Study of Adoption, User Experience, and Performance in Cameroon. You can read it in full at the link in the research section below.
Credentials
- PhD in Information Technology, University of the Cumberlands, 2024
- AWS Solutions Architect Professional
- AWS DevOps Engineer Professional
- AWS Solutions Architect Associate
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
- Terraform Associate
- Published doctoral research on cloud adoption in SMEs
- 12+ years in cloud architecture
Fractional Senior Cloud Architect
An audit answers the question once. Most growing companies then need someone senior who keeps owning the answers. The fractional engagement is the audit's continuation: a set block of senior architect time each month, with one named owner for your cloud decisions.
What the principal owns for you:
- Architecture decisions, reviewed before they are built, not after they break
- Your cloud roadmap, kept current as the business changes
- Vendor and AWS calls, with a senior architect on your side of the table
- Mentoring for your engineers, so the team's judgement grows with the platform
- Cost governance: a monthly review of the bill and a standing savings backlog
Engagement terms: a set monthly block of senior time, scoped on the fit call. Exit on 30 days written notice, at any time. Pricing is set on the fit call, based on the block of time your accounts actually need.
Book a 20-minute fit callWho this is for, and who it is not for
One honest page on fit saves wasted calls on both sides. If your company is in the first column, the fit call is worth your 20 minutes.
Practices built for $20,000+ a month accounts will turn a $5,000 to $15,000 account away. This audit is priced for yours.
A good fit
- Small and mid-size companies on AWS spending about $5,000 or more per month
- Companies whose cloud bill grew faster than their revenue
- Teams with engineers but no senior cloud architect and no one who owns cloud cost
- Companies planning growth, a migration, or a first enterprise customer, who want the architecture checked first
- Owners who want findings in writing before committing to implementation work
Not a fit
- Companies spending well under $5,000 a month on AWS: at that level the fee is hard to justify, and the fit call will say so
- Companies with no AWS footprint and no plan to build one
- Teams that need 24/7 managed support, on-call cover, or day-to-day production operations
- Staff augmentation firms looking to place a contractor
- Companies shopping for the lowest hourly rate
Findings from the dissertation, in plain English
The doctoral research behind this practice studied how small and mid-size companies actually adopt cloud computing. Three of its findings come up in almost every engagement.
Prefer it on one page? Download the three findings as a one-page brief (PDF).
Trust decides, not technology
The adoption decision turned on trust in the provider and the process, not on feature lists. Companies moved when they believed the people guiding them.
What it means for your audit: you see the exact access policy, the counting method and every finding in writing, so the work never has to be taken on trust.
Preparation predicted performance
Companies that prepared before adopting, skills, process and expectations, saw the performance gains. Companies that bought first and prepared later mostly did not.
What it means for your audit: the 90-day action plan sequences each change so your team is ready for it before it lands.
The software was the easy part
The tools installed quickly. The disappointments came from decisions nobody had made explicit: who owns the system, what it costs every month, and who answers when it surprises you.
What it means for your audit: every finding names an owner and a decision, not just a setting to change.
Asked before every audit
The questions owners and CTOs ask on the fit call, answered the same way here.
What access do you need?
A read-only IAM role in your AWS accounts, created by you, using the exact policy we send you before anything is granted. It can see billing data, resource configuration and usage metrics. It cannot change, stop, delete or buy anything. The audit does not need, and does not ask for, your application data or your customer data. When the report is delivered, you delete the role and access ends.
Will anything change in my production environment?
No. The audit is analysis only. Nothing is changed, stopped, resized or purchased in your accounts at any point. If you later choose implementation help, each change is agreed with you before it is made, one at a time.
How are the savings estimates made?
Each finding is priced from your actual usage and your current rates, against your most recent full billing month. Where a finding could be worth a range, the report uses the lower bound. Only recurring savings are counted in a finding's headline figure; one-time cleanups are listed separately. Every estimate states its assumptions next to the number, so your own engineers can check the math.
What if the audit finds little?
The audit is guaranteed: if it does not identify recurring annual savings of at least three times its fee, the fee is refunded. Then the report says so, plainly, and you still receive the full findings and the 90-day plan. Two things protect you before it comes to that. The first is the fit call: if your spend and setup make meaningful savings unlikely, you will be told not to book the audit. The second is how the estimates are built: conservative assumptions, lower bounds, recurring savings only, so the report never needs optimistic numbers to look worthwhile.
Who does the work?
Dr. Primus Vekuh, personally, from the fit call to the walkthrough. There are no account managers, no junior staff and no hand-offs. If a question needs an answer, the person who reviewed your accounts is the person who answers it.
What happens after the audit?
That is your choice, and nothing follows automatically. You can implement the findings with your own team, since the report is yours to keep. You can engage implementation help for specific findings. Or you can move to the fractional architect engagement, where the findings become a standing backlog reviewed every month. You can start with the audit alone and decide afterwards, with the report in hand.
Book an audit intro call
Tell us what you are trying to fix or build. Your monthly AWS spend range helps us judge fit before the call, and if the audit is not likely to pay for itself, you will be told on the call. Replies come within two business days.