02 // What drives your bill
You pay every month for resources nobody uses anymore
The bill grows faster than the usage, and nobody can say offhand what each line item is for. A fixed-price analysis makes both visible.
- 1'200CHF fixed price
- 1-2days to the findings
- read-onlyaccess we need
- CHF 0if we find nothing
Why is my AWS bill going up?
In most cases not because usage is growing, but because resources are left behind. Every single decision was right at the moment it was made, but nobody cleans up afterwards, and AWS keeps billing by the hour. That is why the bill grows monotonically while usage fluctuates.
Where the money typically sits
Six items that turn up in almost every grown AWS account:
- Unattached EBS volumes and old snapshots still running because the instance they belonged to is long gone.
- RDS instances sized for an expected load that never arrived.
- NAT gateway charges for traffic that should run over VPC endpoints, where it would cost nothing.
- Missing Savings Plans or Reserved Instances on a base load that has been stable for months.
- Cross-AZ traffic between components that could sit in the same availability zone.
- Log groups without a retention period, keeping every line for years.
None of these stand out day to day, because none of them cause an incident. They only become visible when someone holds the bill line by line against actual usage.
You can look for yourself. Our handout takes this list apart: seven items, each with the command or the Cost Explorer view that confirms it in minutes, plus the order of magnitude involved. Free, no sign-up, German only.
→ Download PDF: Seven items that inflate an AWS bill (in German)
How the analysis runs
You give us an export of the Cost and Usage Report and an IAM role with read-only rights. We need no access to production data and change nothing in your account during the analysis.
After one to two days the findings are ready. Every item is listed with an estimated annual saving in CHF and the effort it takes to realise it. The list is ranked by the ratio of the two, so by what you should touch first.
What it costs, and what we commit to
CHF 1’200 fixed price. If we find less in estimated annual savings than the analysis costs, we do not invoice it.
We can make that commitment because the six items above sit in almost every account that has grown over years. It is not a bet, it is a statement about how grown cloud accounts behave.
What happens next
You can act on the findings internally, with another partner, or with us. We quote individual measures at a fixed price, between CHF 2’000 and CHF 8’000 depending on the intervention. If the findings show that the cost is a symptom of the architecture rather than the cause, the AWS Health Check at CHF 12’000 is the next step.
Why work with us
- You work directly with the senior architect who does the analysis. No account manager handing the work to a junior.
- We run AWS accounts ourselves and see the same bill every month: SCMC.ch in production since November 2025, Quartiero since July 2026 with a device fleet, three portals and a resident app, both in AWS Zurich. We optimise nothing we have not already optimised on our own accounts.
- We are based in Bern, your data sits in AWS Zurich. Fluent German and English, with an understanding of the Swiss business context.
- The analysis is separate from the implementation. We have no interest in inventing findings we then get to fix ourselves.
Common questions
What does an AWS cost analysis cost?
CHF 1'200 as a fixed price for one to two days. That covers the analysis of the Cost and Usage Report, the written findings with an estimated annual saving in CHF and an implementation effort per item, and the ranking by the ratio of the two. If we find less in annual savings than the analysis costs, we do not invoice it.
What access do you need to our AWS account?
An export of the Cost and Usage Report and an IAM role with read-only rights. We need no access to production data to judge costs, and we change nothing in your account during the analysis. You can remove the role once the findings are delivered.
What is the difference between the cost analysis and the AWS Health Check?
The cost analysis looks only at the bill and takes one to two days, CHF 1'200. The AWS Health Check reviews the whole architecture against the five Well-Architected pillars, so security, reliability and operations as well, takes two weeks and costs CHF 12'000. The cost analysis is the small way in, and many clients use it to decide whether the broader look is worth it.
Is it worth it on an AWS bill of CHF 3'000 a month?
Usually yes, because the items in question grow with time rather than with usage. From around CHF 3'000 a month, a grown account will as a rule hold several times the fee in annual savings. Below that we will tell you honestly in the first call that the effort does not pay off for you yet.
What happens if you find nothing?
Then you pay nothing. The commitment applies whenever the estimated annual saving we find is below the fee. You keep the findings either way, because the confirmation that an account runs clean is a usable answer too.
Do you know what your AWS bill stands for, line by line?
In a 30-minute call we work out whether an analysis pays off for you. If your bill is too small or your account too clean, we say so and you save the CHF 1'200.