Cloud cost optimization for mid-market businesses
Cloud cost optimization is the practice of reducing what you pay for infrastructure, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, without reducing what it does. That means right-sizing resources, replacing on-demand pricing with committed rates, removing what nobody uses, and renegotiating the agreement itself. Stackstone reviews your cloud spend independently, and the assessment is free.
Where does cloud overspending actually come from?
Cloud bills grow the way SaaS bills grow: one reasonable decision at a time, with nobody assigned to watch the total. In mid-market environments, the waste concentrates in a handful of places:
- Over-provisioned compute, instances and databases sized for a peak that rarely arrives, then never revisited
- On-demand pricing on steady workloads, paying the most flexible rate for servers that run 24/7 and never change
- Orphaned resources, unattached storage volumes, old snapshots, and idle test environments that outlived their project
- Storage and egress, cold data sitting in hot storage tiers, and data-transfer charges nobody has mapped
- Commitments signed without benchmarking, enterprise agreements rolled over at renewal instead of renegotiated
None of this is carelessness. It’s what happens when engineers are measured on shipping and uptime, not on the invoice, and when the person who sees the bill isn’t the person who provisions the resources.
Reserved instances, savings plans, or on-demand: which should you use?
Most of the commercial savings in cloud come from matching the right pricing model to each workload. The models differ in how much you commit and how much flexibility you give up:
| Pricing model | How it works | Best fit | The trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| On-demand | Pay the list rate by the hour or second; stop anytime | Spiky, unpredictable, or short-lived workloads | The most expensive way to run anything steady |
| Reserved instances | Commit to specific instance types for one or three years at a discount | Stable workloads you can forecast with confidence | Locked to instance families; over-buying wastes the discount |
| Savings plans / committed use | Commit to an hourly spend level rather than specific instances | Steady overall usage with a changing instance mix | Still a commitment; over-committing means paying for capacity you don't use |
| Spot / preemptible | Deeply discounted spare capacity the provider can reclaim | Fault-tolerant batch jobs and flexible processing | Unsuitable for anything that can't be interrupted |
The failure mode runs in both directions. Under-committed environments pay on-demand rates for perfectly predictable workloads. Over-committed ones pay for reservations that no longer match how the environment actually runs. An independent review measures your real usage against your commitments before recommending either, and shows the math.
What does an independent cloud cost review cover?
Cloud is one module of our broader technology spend assessment, which reviews software, telecom, cloud, and vendor contracts together. The cloud portion covers the commercial side of your IaaS spend:
- Right-sizing analysis: measured utilization against provisioned capacity
- Commitment coverage: your on-demand vs. reserved and savings-plan mix against real usage
- Unused and orphaned resources across accounts, projects, and regions
- Storage tiering and egress patterns
- The agreement itself: enterprise discount programs, committed-spend terms, and renewal leverage with your cloud provider
You share billing exports and the current agreement; we do the analysis and return a prioritized list of savings opportunities with projected dollar amounts, before you commit to anything.
Do you need a FinOps platform to cut cloud costs?
Usually not at mid-market scale. FinOps platforms are genuinely useful for large engineering organizations with dozens of accounts and dedicated cost teams, but they typically price as a percentage of your cloud spend, and they still need someone to act on what they surface. A dashboard that nobody owns becomes one more subscription on the bill it was supposed to shrink.
Stackstone is advisor-led: there is no platform to buy. We work from your billing data and the cost-management tools already built into your cloud console. If your spend and team grow to the point where a platform earns its keep, we’ll tell you that too, we don’t sell one either way.
What can an advisor fix, and what needs your engineering team?
An honest answer, because not everything on a cloud bill can be fixed from the commercial side:
- Advisor-led, little or no code change: commitment coverage, agreement renegotiation, orphaned-resource cleanup, storage tiering, license and support-tier review
- Engineering-led: re-architecting services, autoscaling, containerization, and moving workloads between services or providers
Where the savings require engineering work, we identify the items and size them in dollars so your team can decide what’s worth the effort, but your engineers own that work, and we say so upfront rather than promising savings we can’t deliver from the outside.
How does cloud fit into the rest of your technology spend?
Cloud is rarely the whole problem. The same review discipline applied to SaaS and telecom spend typically recovers 15–25% of software costs and 20–30% of telecom costs (industry benchmarks; results vary). For cloud we don’t quote a typical percentage, the honest range depends entirely on your workload mix and how recently anyone looked, which is why we quantify it per engagement instead. Reviewing all of it together also surfaces the overlaps a single-category review misses: SaaS tools duplicating cloud services, and connectivity contracts that no longer match where your infrastructure lives. Our case studies show what that combined review has produced for past clients.
How is Stackstone paid for cloud cost optimization?
The assessment is free. For optimization work, we're typically compensated through standard supplier commissions on the contracts we help you source and manage, so there is usually no direct cost to you. We never charge hourly or retainer fees; if an engagement ever includes a fee at all, it's only a share of savings actually realized, agreed in writing up front. We disclose how we’re paid for yours so you can weigh the advice accordingly. We’re independent of the cloud providers: we don’t resell AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, and you keep your existing provider unless switching is clearly the better move. More detail in how technology consultants get paid and independent advisor vs. reseller.
Want your specific number? Run the savings calculator or book a discovery call.
By Shane Stewart, Founder of Stackstone Advisory, independent technology spend advisor.
Last updated: July 2026.
Common questions
What is cloud cost optimization?
Cloud cost optimization is the practice of reducing what you pay AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud without reducing what the infrastructure does. It combines right-sizing, commitment coverage (reserved instances and savings plans), removing unused resources, storage tiering, and renegotiating the cloud agreement itself.
Do I need a FinOps platform to reduce cloud costs?
Usually not at mid-market scale. FinOps platforms typically price as a percentage of cloud spend and still need someone to act on what they surface. Stackstone has no platform to sell; we work from your billing data and the cost tools already built into your cloud console.
Can you renegotiate an existing AWS or Azure agreement?
Often, yes. Enterprise discount programs and committed-spend agreements are negotiable at renewal, and sometimes mid-term when your usage has changed materially. The leverage comes from knowing your real usage, your growth trajectory, and what comparable commitments look like in the market.
How much can we save on cloud costs?
It varies too much by workload mix for an honest advisor to quote a typical percentage upfront. That is why the assessment comes first: we quantify your specific savings in dollars before you commit to anything. The assessment is free.
Will cloud optimization disrupt our engineering team?
The commercial levers, commitment coverage, agreement terms, orphaned resources, storage tiering, need very little engineering time. Architectural changes like re-platforming or autoscaling do need your engineers; we identify and size those items in dollars so your team can decide whether they are worth the effort.
What does the cloud cost assessment cost?
Nothing. The assessment is free, and we're typically compensated through standard supplier commissions on the contracts we help you source and manage, so there is usually no direct cost to you. We never charge hourly or retainer fees; if an engagement ever includes a fee at all, it's only a share of savings actually realized, agreed in writing up front. We disclose how we're paid for yours.
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