A third of the cloud bill found in the first review of an AWS account

The account had grown one project at a time. Two large servers ran around the clock, hundreds of gigabytes of old database dumps sat in a bucket nobody remembered, the main disk was 92% full, and cost reporting had never been switched on. An automated calling campaign was firing every day, and nobody knew that every single call had been failing at the carrier for two weeks.

Stingy and the Engineer inventoried the account with a read-only key: every server, disk, bucket, database and scheduled job, with its cost at list price. Each finding was filed as an insight on the client's AWS page with the saving, the risk and the exact action for their developer.

Meister added a check for the calling campaign: a window with calls placed and none connected is an error, with the carrier's reason attached, so a broken pipe can no longer burn leads quietly.

The same discipline is applied to the client's AI spend on the platform itself: a monthly cap that cannot be exceeded, cost per verified item, a month-end projection every week, and model routing proposals when a cheaper model does the same job.