Since 2023 we’ve run 27 cloud cost reviews for logistics, retail and financial services companies, spending between AED 150,000 and AED 4.5 million a month. On average we found savings of 31%. What surprised us was how similar the causes were.
1. Machines sized for a peak that never comes
Most services run on instances chosen at launch, often for a load test, and never revisited. Right-sizing with a few weeks of real usage data was the biggest single saving in 19 of the 27 reviews.
2. Environments nobody switched off
Staging, demo and load-test environments running all weekend, every weekend. Scheduling non-production environments to stop outside working hours typically cuts their cost by 65%.
3. Data that moves more than it needs to
Traffic between zones and regions is easy to miss and expensive at volume. Chatty services in different zones were costing one retailer more than its databases.
4. Storage that only grows
- Logs kept at full price for years rather than moved to cheaper tiers after 30 days.
- Snapshots of volumes that were deleted long ago.
- Copies of production data in every test environment.
5. Commitments that don’t match usage
Savings plans and reserved capacity bought for last year’s architecture. Fix the first four before buying more commitments, or you lock in the waste.
Fix the shape of the system first, then buy discounts. The other way round, you pay to keep the mistakes.
Keeping it fixed
Savings fade unless someone owns them. We set a budget and an alert per team, and add cost to the same dashboard as latency and errors. When engineers can see the cost of a change in the same place as its performance, they make good decisions on their own.
Our three-week cost review is fixed at AED 75,000. If we find less than that in yearly savings, we refund the difference.
