The Problem: Over-Provisioning Is an Epidemic
Across 20 cloud migration engagements over the past 18 months, we found that the average Indian startup was over-provisioning compute by 3.4x and had never enabled a single Reserved Instance or Savings Plan. The result: cloud bills that grew faster than revenue, eroding runway and forcing premature fundraising.
Our Five-Step Cost Optimisation Playbook
- Right-sizing audit: analyse CPU and memory utilisation over 30 days using CloudWatch or GCP Monitoring; downgrade instances with <20% average utilisation
- Savings Plans over On-Demand: a 1-year Compute Savings Plan on AWS typically saves 30–40% with no usage commitment
- Spot Instances for fault-tolerant workloads: CI/CD pipelines, batch jobs, and ML training can all run on Spot at 70–90% discount
- S3 Intelligent-Tiering for object storage: automatically moves infrequently accessed data to cheaper storage classes
- Database right-sizing: switch from RDS Multi-AZ during development to Single-AZ with automated snapshots — save up to 50% on non-production DBs
One fintech client reduced their monthly AWS bill from ₹8.2 lakh to ₹4.9 lakh — a 40% saving — within 45 days of implementing this playbook. The savings funded two additional engineering hires, directly accelerating their product roadmap.