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Free · 20-point PDF checklist

Your cloud bill is hiding 20–40% waste.Find it in an hour.

The Cloud Bill Health Checklist: 20 checks for AWS, GCP, Azure and DigitalOcean. Each one tells you what to look for, how to check it in your own console, and what the finding is usually worth. No tools to install, no call to book — just your billing console and one focused hour.

Instant download, plus a copy to your inbox. Most teams find their first saving in the first five checks.

What the 20 checks cover

Six sections, ordered the way the waste usually ranks. One example from each:

4 checks

Compute & Sizing

Non-production environments running 24/7 — staging mirrors production around the clock; nights and weekends are ~65% of the hours you pay for.

4 checks

Storage & Data

Snapshot sprawl — terabytes of backups nobody can name, kept forever by default.

4 checks

Traffic & Network

Cross-AZ chatter — microservices in different zones paying per-GB to talk to each other.

3 checks

Databases

Over-provisioned instances — production databases idling at 10% on XL classes.

4 checks

Security

Stale access keys — ex-contractor credentials that still open production.

1 check

Governance

Nobody owns the bill — unreviewed waste compounds quietly, quarter after quarter.

Tick every box that applies. Then count.

0–4 ticked

A well-run account. Re-run this checklist twice a year.

5–11 ticked

You’re leaking. Fixing just the compute and storage sections usually pays for a professional audit several times over.

12+ ticked

Your bill is very likely 25–40% too high — and at least one security finding needs attention this week.

Written from production, not from a blog post

These 20 checks are the ones we run monthly on infrastructure we operate ourselves: the exam platform we’ve engineered inside for 10+ years (TestReach — where thousands of candidates arrive in the same minute), a US messaging platform handling millions of texts a month, and Genius AI’s zero-to-100K-user launch. Cost review is routine practice for us — this is the routine.

Rather have engineers run it for you?

The 5-day Cloud Cost & Security Audit puts a dollar figure on every box — read-only access, fixed price. If we don’t find savings worth 3× the fee, it’s free.

About the audit →