Why SaaS cloud costs get out of control
The same handful of patterns explain most "where is the money going?" moments.
Fast growth hides waste
Teams ship product and support customers — cost controls come later, and accumulate quietly.
Environments multiply
Dev, staging, test, demo and customer-specific environments quietly consume budget.
Databases become expensive
RDS, Azure SQL, storage, backups and replicas often dominate the bill once growth kicks in.
Logging and monitoring grow
Telemetry matters — but noisy logs and long retention can become very expensive.
No clear ownership
Without tagging, budgets and accountability, cloud spend becomes everyone's problem and nobody's responsibility.
Architecture choices age
What suited v1 is over-provisioned for today's load patterns.
What we review
- AWS and Azure monthly spend
- Usage trends
- Idle resources
- Overprovisioned compute
- Database costs
- Storage and backup costs
- Data transfer
- Logging and telemetry costs
- Reserved Instances / Savings Plans / Reservations
- Tagging and ownership
- Budget alerts
- Environment lifecycle
- Customer profitability signals
- Dev/test scheduling
- Governance controls
Cost optimisation without damaging SaaS reliability
Saving money matters. Causing an outage to do it doesn't. We prioritise performance-safe changes first.
- Low-risk quick wins
- Visibility improvements
- Waste removal
- Rightsizing with evidence
- Reservation planning
- Environment scheduling
- Tagging and accountability
- Performance-safe architecture changes
- Governance improvements
SaaS cost optimisation outputs
Cost waste report
Clear summary of avoidable or questionable cloud spend.
Savings priority plan
Quick wins, medium-term improvements and structural changes.
Risk notes
Where savings could affect performance, resilience or customer experience.
Governance recommendations
Tagging, budgets, reporting, ownership and review cadence.
Implementation support
Engineer-led help to safely make the changes.
Per-customer cost view
Optional allocation work so finance can see customer profitability.
AWS and Azure cost focus
AWS SaaS cost focus
- EC2
- RDS
- ECS/EKS
- Lambda
- S3
- CloudWatch
- NAT gateways
- Data transfer
- Savings Plans
- Reserved Instances
- Cost Explorer
- Budgets
- Tagging
Azure SaaS cost focus
- App Service Plans
- AKS
- Azure SQL
- Storage
- Log Analytics
- Application Insights
- Virtual Machines
- Reservations
- Azure Cost Management
- Budgets
- Tags