Owen runs a UK B2B SaaS. His AWS bill in 2023 was £3,200 a month. By early 2025 it was £14,800 a month, and his customers had only grown 2.3×. The CFO sent the invoice over Slack on a Wednesday with one word: “Why?” Owen didn’t have an answer.
Service AWS consulting · cost optimisation + architecture audit · UK
AWS consulting that cuts the bill. not the product.
AWS consulting for UK SaaS, fintech, and B2B teams. We audit your estate, harden IAM, and cost-engineer the invoice that surprised your CFO — a written plan with a GBP saving per line. Median rescue cut: 38%.
24hreply, from a senior
200+projects shipped since 2019
Senioronly, on the spine
(Why CTOs book AWS consulting)
Your AWS bill grew because the product grew. It doesn’t have to keep growing.
An AWS account isn’t a cost centre you can’t see into. 5 days of senior solutions-architect attention turns the invoice that surprised your CFO into a line-item plan you both read. You decide what to implement and with whom.
0
£2.8M
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The founder this page is for£3.2K/mo £14.8K/mo · customers up 2.3× · £8.2K
Owen’s SaaS ran on AWS. The bill quintupled. Customers only doubled.
The team had moved fast and the architecture had grown without a topology document. EC2 instances were sized for a spike that came once a quarter. An RDS read replica spun up in 2023 had been forgotten. Three NAT gateways billed 24/7 for a workload that ran four hours a day.
We ran the 5-day audit and found eleven cost wins, ranked by effort and saving. 6 weeks later the bill was £8,200 a month, same workload, 45% cut. The CFO replied with one word: “Better.” This page is for the founder or CTO whose AWS bill outgrew the product, and who wants the number back under control without breaking production.
AWS COST WINS WE FIND ON 80% OF AUDITS
What we almost always find. And the GBP it puts back.
These four patterns show up in roughly 80% of the AWS estates we audit. Most clients have at least six wins in total. None of them breaks production to fix.
Over-provisioned EC2
Instances sized for the spike that hits twice a quarter, paid for around the clock. Right-sizing plus Auto Scaling typically saves 40-60% on that line.
Three NAT gateways for one workload
Multi-AZ NAT was the right call once. Now the workload runs four hours a day. VPC endpoints replace two of three, a median £300 a month back.
No Savings Plan or RI coverage
On-demand EC2 and RDS at 100% baseline. A one-year No Upfront Savings Plan cuts 28-32%. A three-year All Upfront cuts 45-55%. We model it on your real usage.
Untagged spend you can’t read
When 40% of the bill has no cost-allocation tag, nobody can tell which service is bleeding. Tagging policy and enforcement first, savings second.
Process
5 days. One written cost plan your CFO can read
NDA Monday morning, read-only IAM role granted. Written cost-and-architecture report Friday afternoon. You decide what to implement and with whom.
Day-01
Topology + IAM scan
Account inventory. VPC, subnet and routing map. IAM roles, policies and SCPs. Trusted Advisor plus Security Hub findings. The map nobody’s drawn since 2022.
Day-02
Cost line-item review
Cost Explorer plus CUR over six months. Per-service and per-tag spend. Unattached and idle resources. RI and Savings Plan coverage. The line items that grew unnoticed.
Day-03
Performance + reliability
EC2 right-sizing. RDS and Aurora utilisation. Lambda cold starts. CloudFront cache-hit ratio. Multi-AZ and DR posture stress-tested on paper.
Day-04
Security + compliance
IAM least-privilege gap list. Public S3 scan. Open security groups. Encryption and KMS rotation. WAF and Shield. CloudTrail. SOC-2 and ISO 27001 readiness mapped.
Day-05
Written cost plan
Prioritised cost-reduction plan with a monthly GBP saving per line. IAM remediation ranked by risk. DR list. Walkthrough recorded for your CFO.
The AWS surface we know in production.
AWS is the default we reach for, with 50+ projects shipped on it. Where your data residency, vendor relationships, or existing estate call for it, we’re comfortable on the rest.
T1
Compute, data + the bill we cut first
audited every timeEC2LambdaECS + FargateEKSRDS + AuroraDynamoDBS3 + lifecycleElastiCacheCloudFrontSavings Plans / RIsCost Explorer + CURAuto Scaling
T2
Networking, security + compliance
reach when the brief needs itVPC + SubnetsRoute 53IAM + SCPsWAF + ShieldSecrets ManagerKMSControl TowerCloudTrail
T3
Eventing, observability + IaC
the senior depthEventBridgeSQS + SNSStep FunctionsCloudWatchX-Ray + DatadogSentryTerraform + CDKGitHub ActionsBedrock
The AWS pains we hear in every audit call
The pain you live with. The fix the audit ships.
Each one is the difference between an AWS bill that tracks your product and one that surprises your board.
45%
Monthly spend removed, same workload
0
Incidents from our changes in 7 years
“The CFO sent the invoice with one word: ‘Why?’ 6 weeks later, £14.8K a month became £8.2K. The reply was one word: ‘Better.’”
001
The bill nobody can read
The CFO asked why the AWS bill tripled and you couldn’t answer line by line. Per-service, per-tag spend over six months. Cost Explorer plus CUR, and a tagging policy so next month is attributable.
002
Over-provisioned compute
An EC2 fleet sized for a spike that arrives twice a quarter, billed 24/7. Right-sizing plus Auto Scaling, modelled on real load. 40-60% off the compute line on most estates.
003
No commitment coverage
Paying on-demand for a baseline that never moves. A Savings Plan or Reserved Instance modelled on your usage. One-year No Upfront cuts 28-32%, three-year All Upfront cuts 45-55%.
004
IAM wildcards + open SCPs
IAM grew organically and you can’t prove least-privilege to a diligence team. An IAM remediation list ranked by risk, mapped to SOC-2 and ISO 27001, so the security questionnaire stops being a fire drill.
005
Forgotten idle resources
An RDS read replica from 2023 nobody remembers spinning up, still billing. An unattached and idle resource sweep: idle replicas, orphaned volumes, unattached EIPs, cold S3 in Standard. Quick wins that close in an afternoon.
006
Reseller lock-in
A last partner whose advice always pushed you up a billing tier. We don’t resell AWS. Your billing stays direct with AWS and we bill engineering time, not a markup, so the advice has no bias to sell you more.
AWS cost optimisation · B2B SaaS · UK · 280 customers
Owen’s AWS audit,
Owen’s AWS audit,
in real numbers, line by line
5-day audit found 11 cost wins ranked by effort and saving. Owen implemented six quick wins in two weeks. We shipped three medium wins over four weeks: Aurora Serverless v2, VPC endpoints, S3 lifecycle. Two strategic wins, a Lambda re-architecture and a Savings Plan, landed in weeks five and six. Production never blinked.
The AWS bill
£14.8K£8.2K
Per month, same workload
45%
Monthly spend removed
The return
£79K
Saved per year
Wk 3
Audit paid back by
The track record
54
AWS engagements since 2019
0
Incidents from our changes
Three ways to start · pricing in the email back
Start with the audit. Implement with whoever you trust.
No reseller margin, no lock-in. You own the AWS billing relationship throughout. Pick the engagement that fits where you are.
MOST COMMON(01)
5-day AWS audit
A £8K fixed-scope read of your account by two senior solutions architects. The written plan, no commitment to implement.
Cost-reduction plan with GBP per lineIAM + security finding listMulti-AZ + DR posture reviewYou decide what to implement
5-day AWS audit
AUDIT + DELIVERY(02)
Audit + 6-week cost sprint
We implement the prioritised wins behind the scenes. Production unaffected. Median £6.3K a month saving locked in.
Audit + implementationRight-sizing + Savings Plan30-day on-call post-handoverDocumented runbook
Audit + 6-week cost sprint
ONGOING(03)
Fractional AWS architect
A senior AWS voice on your weekly engineering calls. Quarterly cost reviews. Architecture decisions defended at the board.
Weekly AWS reviewQuarterly cost report30-day notice both waysPause and resume any month
Fractional AWS architect
What CTOs and CFOs ask before booking the audit
Pain-first, soft-second.
We hold AWS partner-grade certifications across our senior team. We don’t resell AWS. Your AWS billing relationship stays direct with AWS, and we bill our engineering time, not a markup on your infra. That’s a structural choice in this AWS consulting model: it means our advice never has a reseller bias to push you up a tier.
5 days of senior solutions-architect attention on your account. Topology and IAM scan. Six months of Cost Explorer and CUR analysis. EC2, RDS and Lambda right-sizing model. A Savings Plan or Reserved Instance recommendation modelled on your real usage. Multi-AZ and DR posture review. A written cost-reduction plan with a monthly GBP saving per line item, an IAM remediation list ranked by risk, and a walkthrough with your team and CFO recorded.
Our median AWS cost optimisation rescue cuts the monthly bill by 38%. The range across 54 engagements runs from 18% on already-tight accounts to 62% on accounts that grew without cost discipline. The audit pays back inside the first quarter on the median engagement. Twelve clients in 2025 had it pay back inside the first month.
No, if we do our job. Cost changes ship behind a feature flag or with a tested rollback plan. We’ve run 54 AWS engagements since 2019 with zero production incidents caused by our changes. Right-sizing happens with Auto Scaling tested. Savings Plans are commitments, not rewrites. The riskier items, like architectural migrations, are scoped separately and shipped behind the scenes.
Yes. About a third of our audited clients implement the cost plan in-house. The written plan has effort estimates, sample code where relevant, and the order to do things in. We’re happy to review your team’s implementation PRs on a small retainer if you want a second senior voice, but there’s no obligation to use us.
No. The audit runs from a read-only IAM role with SecurityAudit, Billing and ReadOnlyAccess managed policies. No write access. No ability to create resources. If we recommend changes, your team owns the implementation, or we propose a separate implementation engagement with explicit write scope you sign off.
That’s exactly what day four of the AWS architecture audit covers. IAM least-privilege, CloudTrail completeness, KMS key rotation, public-resource scan, WAF posture, all mapped against SOC-2 and ISO 27001 controls. We’ve passed three Series A diligence reviews in 2025 on the audit’s security pack alone.
Yes, before any account access. NDA signed inside 30 minutes via DocuSign, mutual template ready. The audit report is encrypted at rest, accessible only to the senior engineers on your project, and destroyed 90 days after handover unless you ask us to keep it longer.
Yes, with 14 days’ notice on any implementation or retainer engagement. Spend pauses, engineers move to other work, and you resume with 14 days’ notice when you’re ready. The audit itself is a fixed £8K, so there’s nothing open-ended to pause there. No cancellation fee either way.
In context
What it looks like shipped.
aws consulting, in context — the dashboards, flows and components your team actually ships, reviews and maintains.
Book the 5-day AWS audit. Cost plan on Friday.
Tell us the rough monthly bill, the AWS account count, and the question your CFO asked you on Slack. Mohit replies inside 24 hours: a clear yes, a clear no, or the one question that decides it.
What happens after the email lands
- < 24h
A personal reply.
Yes, no, or the deciding question. Straight to your inbox.
- Mon
NDA + read-only role.
NDA inside 30 minutes. A read-only IAM role, no write access.
- Fri
Cost plan delivered.
Line-item savings in GBP, IAM list, DR review, walkthrough recorded.