The system is live.
Customers, revenue or core operations depend on it. Savings must not compromise availability or performance.
All services
AWS FinOps
Cut your AWS bill. Without giving up performance.
Cloud costs grow quietly. At first nobody notices, then the invoice becomes an agenda item. I find the places where your budget leaks away, put a number on effort and risk for every measure, and implement them. If it does not save measurably, I do not do it.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – ProfessionalCost & Usage ReportTerraform
What you get
- A cost analysis built on the Cost & Usage Report, not on gut feeling
- A ranked list of measures with savings, effort and risk for each
- The quick wins implemented in the first weeks
- A tagging model and budget alerts, so it does not happen again
Scope & working together
The cost analysis delivers a written report with prioritized measures within ten working days. Implementation afterwards is time and materials, or fixed price for clearly bounded packages.
Remote from Germany. Straight with me, no agency in between.
The starting point
The invoice grows. The load does not.
AWS makes it easy to create resources and hard to find them again. A proof of concept from two years ago is still running. A staging environment runs through the night and the weekend. A database cluster was sized for a peak that never came.
The uncomfortable part: cost is an architecture symptom. Adjusting instance sizes saves once. Understanding why an architecture is expensive saves permanently. Cross-AZ traffic, NAT gateway throughput, unbounded log ingestion. The most expensive line items are rarely where you would look for them.
Typical symptoms- Nobody can say which team is responsible for which share of the bill.
- Instances run at single-digit CPU utilization across the year.
- Snapshots and old S3 versions from projects that no longer exist.
- Log and metric costs exceed the cost of the application itself.
- Savings Plans expire and it only shows up on the invoice.
- The cost conversation regularly ends without a decision.
Who this is for
For owners whose AWS estate has become more than infrastructure.
For CTOs, technical leaders and platform owners in established SaaS, platform and mid-market companies. AWS is productive, business-critical and has grown over time, but the bill is no longer explainable with confidence.
Costs matter but lack transparency.
The bill rises or fluctuates, ownership is unclear and measures are discussed without knowing their actual effect.
Your team needs priorities.
You need concrete levers with savings, effort and risk, whether your team implements them or I help.
What I do
Measure.
Prioritize.
Implement.
01
Making costs visible
I work from the Cost & Usage Report, not the console summary page. Costs get broken down by service, environment, team and workload. By the end you know which euro goes where, which is the precondition for every decision after that.
02
Rightsizing and scheduling
Compute and databases sized for actual load rather than the load someone expected three years ago. Non-production environments run only when someone needs them. Unglamorous, and usually the fastest double-digit percentage available.
03
Getting commitments right
Savings Plans and Reserved Instances are both a lever and a trap. I calculate from your actual baseline consumption, recommend term and coverage deliberately conservatively, and set up monitoring that warns before they expire.
04
Storage and data transfer
S3 lifecycle rules, Intelligent-Tiering, clearing out orphaned snapshots and EBS volumes. Plus the invisible line items: cross-AZ traffic, NAT gateways, log retention. This is where the money sits that never shows up in an instance list.
05
Governance that sticks
A tagging model enforced in Terraform, budgets with per-team alerts, and a monthly report that works without me. Cost optimization is not an exercise, it is a habit.
Do you know what your AWS bill is actually for?
Let’s spend 30 minutes on the biggest levers.
How it runs
Measure first, then save.
Every measure gets a number, before and after. What cannot be measured does not get recommended.
STEP 01
Establish the order of magnitude
Monthly bill, account structure, biggest pain points. After that you know whether an analysis is worth it.
STEP 02
Result within ten working days
Evaluating CUR and usage data. The result: a list of measures with potential, effort and risk for each.
STEP 03
Quick wins first
Everything that needs no architecture change goes first: rightsizing, scheduling, storage lifecycle, commitments.
STEP 04
Structural levers
Then the items that require touching the architecture, each with the maths done up front on whether it pays.
Entry offer
AWS cost analysis. Fixed price 2,400 €
Before anyone changes your infrastructure, you should know where the money goes. That is what the AWS cost analysis answers, at a fixed price and with a result you can work from without me.
What you get
- A breakdown of your bill from the Cost and Usage Report, not from the console overview
- The ten largest cost drivers, named and explained: where the money goes and why
- The items that appear in no architecture diagram: traffic through NAT gateways, cross zone data transfer, storage in the wrong class, resources with no users
- A prioritized list of measures with estimated monthly saving, effort and risk for each item
- Quick wins listed separately: what can be done immediately without touching the architecture
- One hour of handover, where your team goes through the list and asks questions
What you do not get
- The implementation. Whether, when and with whom you do it is your decision afterwards.
- Write access. I do not change your environment, I read it.
- Access to your application data. I need configuration and utilization, not contents.
- Deliberately priced low: the entry should be small, not the analysis
- Fixed price, regardless of how much I find and how long it takes me
- Result within ten working days, counted from the day the access is in place
- Credited in full if you then commission me for the implementation
- Access is granted only after a mutually signed non-disclosure agreement
- Requirement: read access to the infrastructure, meaning a role with read only rights on configuration and metrics
- Plus the Cost and Usage Report, or permission to set it up. Without both, the bill only shows that something is expensive, not why
- You are under no obligation. Some clients act on the findings themselves, and that is a valid outcome
The outcome
What changes on the invoice.
A bill you can explain
Every line maps to a team, an environment and a workload. Conversations about cost become conversations about priorities.
Savings that stay
Quick wins first, architecture changes after. Every measure with a measured before and after instead of estimated potential.
Early warning instead of hindsight
Budget alerts and anomaly detection flag deviations as they happen, not on the fifth of the following month.
Technologies I use
What I work with.
Cost data
- Cost & Usage Report
- Cost Explorer
- Athena
- AWS Glue
- QuickSight
Commitments
- Savings Plans
- Reserved Instances
- Spot
- Compute Optimizer
Compute
- EC2
- ECS Fargate
- Lambda
- Graviton
- Auto Scaling
Storage
- S3
- S3 Lifecycle
- Intelligent-Tiering
- EBS gp3
- Glacier
Network
- VPC endpoints
- NAT gateway
- CloudFront
- Elastic Load Balancing
Databases
- Amazon RDS
- Aurora
- DynamoDB
- Elasticache
- Redshift
Controls
- AWS Budgets
- Anomaly Detection
- AWS Organizations
- Tagging
Tooling
- Terraform
- AWS CLI
- CloudWatch
- Grafana
From practice
Case study · FinOps
AWS costs cut from €15,000 to €2,500 per month
Two grown AWS accounts, twelve months and €12,500 less cost per month. The same feature set, with no reduction in production availability.
Read the case study–83%AWS costs
€12,500less per month
0cuts to the feature set
Also from real projects
Paper
Usage Before Rate
The same twelve months, ordered along the FinOps Framework: how to build a cost baseline you can trust from the billing export, in which order the measures come, and why commitments come last. With the SQL queries in full. Published under CC BY 4.0.
Read the paper (PDF)
Who you are talking to
Directly with me as a freelancer. No agency in between.
I am Tim Rutte. More than 20 years in software development. Today I read AWS bills and find the architecture decisions driving them. You talk to the person who touches your code, from the first call to the handover.
- 20+years in software development
- 50+successful projects
- 2003working remotely since then
Working together
Working with your team or delivering independently.
You do not need to bring a particular setup. I adapt the engagement to how your company works and how much responsibility you want to hand over.
01Together
I work as part of your team.
If knowledge and responsibilities already sit with you, I join wherever additional experience is needed. Inside your workflows, in direct contact, without creating a parallel track.
- Integration into your sprints, reviews and technical decisions
- Pairing and knowledge transfer throughout delivery
- Code, documentation and operations remain fully with your team
02Independent
I take ownership of delivery.
If you lack time or capacity internally, I take a clearly scoped piece of work from technical clarification through to production. You set the objective and constraints; I take care of the path there.
- One point of contact from clarification through to delivery
- Regular, clear progress updates without day-to-day supervision
- A proper handover with documentation and a walkthrough
Whichever model you choose, you always know what is being built, which decisions are pending and what happens next. Billing follows the project and the model you prefer: clearly bounded work at a fixed price, longer or more open-ended work by time spent.
Continuity
Your system remains yours.
Independent delivery does not create dependency on me. Everything required to develop and operate the result stays in your environment from day one and remains ready for handover throughout the engagement.
Access stays with you.
Code, cloud accounts, pipelines and secrets live in your systems. Operations never depend on a personal account or credentials that only I control.
Knowledge does not stay in my head.
Architecture decisions, operating procedures and known risks are documented where your team will find them and kept current as the work progresses.
Someone else can take over.
Reproducible environments, automated deployments and regular handovers allow your team or another provider to continue without starting again.
The goal is not for you to depend on me permanently. The goal is for you to remain free to decide who develops the system next.
Client voices
What clients say afterwards.
“Thank you for cleaning up our cloud! We finally have our costs under control again. It was fun and the result simply fits.”
“I am very happy with the work. Mr Rutte was fast and dependable. The result was a very good monthly saving on our costs.”
Common questions
Before you ask.
How much can realistically be saved on AWS?
It depends on maturity. In setups that have never been reviewed systematically, double-digit percentages are usually available without touching the architecture: rightsizing, switching off non-production environments, storage lifecycle, sensible commitments. I give you a defensible number after the analysis, based on your data rather than an industry average.
Does performance suffer from the optimization?
No, that is the constraint. Every measure is checked against load profile and latency budget, changes to production compute go through staging and get measured after rollout. Where a saving would cost availability or latency it does not get recommended. It gets presented as a deliberate decision with numbers attached.
How long does a cost analysis take?
For a typical set of accounts, you receive the prioritized list of measures within ten working days, counted from the day access is ready. The first quick wins can often be implemented during the analysis, because they need neither an architecture change nor a deployment.
Do we need a FinOps tool for this?
Not to get started. The Cost & Usage Report plus Athena provides everything a defensible analysis needs. A tool becomes worthwhile when many teams are meant to carry their own cost responsibility permanently. That is a follow-on decision, not a starting point.
Do you also handle ongoing cost control?
On request, as a small recurring engagement: monthly report, review of anomalies and commitments. The normal case, though, is that I set up governance and reporting so your team runs it without me.
Other services
What else I help with.
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Modernizing grown systems step by step: strangler fig instead of a rewrite, operations untouched, every step reversible.
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From your own data centre or another cloud onto AWS, with a cost model before the move and a rollback path for every step.
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The infrastructure behind AI systems that actually ship: MCP servers, controlled tool access, LLM integration with real permissions and cost control.
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Replacing manual workflows with real systems: wired into the software you already run, with permissions and an audit log instead of a chain of tools.
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