Work
Case Studies
Deep-dives into real cloud cost optimization engagements — including the problem, analysis approach, solution, and measurable outcomes.
Enterprise / Multi-Account AWS
$2.5 Million in the Dark: How a Tag Coverage Dashboard Changed the Executive Conversation on Cloud Cost Accountability
A large AWS organisation had been doing FinOps right on paper. Cost Explorer configured, budgets set, alerts in place. But 38% of their total cloud spend was completely untagged. No business unit. No application. No environment. $2.5 million a year that finance couldn't attribute, and that nobody owned. The problem wasn't technical. It was that nobody with authority had ever seen the number.
Outcome
Identified $2.5M in unallocated annual cloud spend. Secured executive mandate to enforce tagging standards, implement AWS Config rules, and establish a 90-day roadmap to reduce unallocated cost below 5%.
April 3, 2026
Manufacturing / Industrial
The $47,000 Athena Bill: How a Real-Time Manufacturing Dashboard Was Quietly Bankrupting Its Own Pipeline
A manufacturing company's Athena costs exploded to nearly 10x their baseline in a single billing cycle. Their data team was doing everything right — real-time streaming, live dashboards, instant insights from the factory floor. They just had no idea what it was costing them to do it.
Outcome
89% reduction in Athena costs — from $47,000 to ~$5,200/month
February 18, 2026
Enterprise SaaS / Multi-Account AWS
Five Applications, One Bill, No Answers: Untangling Application Cost Attribution Across a Multi-Account AWS Environment
The client's ask sounded simple: tell us what each of our five applications costs to run on AWS. Three months later, after tag naming chaos, department pushback, a call to AWS about recovering historical data, and a Marketplace spend discovery that changed the numbers entirely, we had an answer. This is what the process actually looked like.
Outcome
Attributed $2.1M in previously unallocated or misattributed AWS spend across 5 applications. Recovered 6 months of historical tag data via AWS backfill. Identified $217,000 in Marketplace and license costs that had been excluded from application cost totals. Delivered per-application cost baseline used by leadership for roadmap prioritisation.
January 20, 2026
Financial Services
When a Marketplace Tool Nearly Doubled the AWS Bill: The Elastio Incident
A client's S3, GuardDuty, and CloudTrail charges started spiking without any apparent infrastructure change. The culprit turned out to be a backup tool purchased from the AWS Marketplace that nobody remembered was still running.
Outcome
Billing relief secured from AWS + runaway charges fully stopped
March 10, 2025
SaaS / Technology
Reducing AWS Spend by 42% for a Mid-Size SaaS Company
A SaaS company with 200+ engineers was spending $180,000/month on AWS with no cost allocation, unchecked On-Demand usage, and zero Reserved Instance coverage. Here's how we brought that under control.
Outcome
42% cost reduction — $75,600/month saved
January 20, 2024
Cloud Services / Enterprise
The $340,000 Tax Bill That Wasn't: Fixing AWS Tax Exemption Across a Multi-Account Environment
A large cloud services organization was unknowingly paying U.S. sales tax on hundreds of thousands of dollars in AWS spend — despite having valid resale exemption certificates. The root cause wasn't a missing certificate. It was a misread UI and a chain of misunderstandings that nobody stopped to question.
Outcome
Full tax exemption applied — $340K+ in annual charges resolved
January 10, 2024