Frequently asked questions

We help our customers pay less for AWS through an advanced approach to the use of Reserved Instance and Savings Plan commitments. This enables us to deliver savings on all services for which commitments can be purchased without creating large lock-in to a specific spend or usage pattern.

We have never found an organization we couldn’t create additional savings for. How much we could actually save you entirely depends on what you use, how you use it and how well optimized you already are.
Rather than guess or overstate the potential with unrealistic, best case scenarios we’ve made it easy for you to receive a tailored evidence-based report.

Our free Savings Review walks you through the process of granting the light touch access we need to your AWS Cost and Usage Report. In the results you’ll see how well optimized you are, receive insights into your current approach and see projections about what more we could do for you. 

It’s important to remember that savings are not just financial. We'll also save you time you can spend focusing elsewhere.

The secret is intense usage monitoring, automated actions to respond to changes, making use of all available Reserved Instance and Savings Plan commitment buying and selling options whilst staggering commitment end dates to allow more precise control.

In this way we can balance discount and lock-in risk whilst avoiding making commitments to large amounts of spend beyond just the short term. With carefully managed strategies this strikes the balance that suits your environment and gives you savings without compromising your flexibility to change how you use the cloud. Learn more.

Yes, even if you are optimizing usage, refactoring, migrating new workloads or decommissioning legacy environments. We can help you make savings during the transition stage and ensure you have a flexible foundation of RI & SP for the future.

Our free Savings Review will provide the basis for us to discuss where you are now and what your future plans are. Our team is here to help you understand your options.

Where usage is stable and predictable it may be more efficient for you to manage savings yourself.

You can use our free Savings Review to see how well optimized you are now and how effectively you’re using the different options for RIs and SPs. Our team will be available to offer insights and experience which may help you improve your current processes.

It is true that AWS provides lots of tools to help you see where Reserved Instance and Savings Plan commitments might make you savings.

Many organizations could do more themselves, but in reality often they don’t and we find savings at every organization we review. The reason for this is not tooling (there’s plenty of recommendation engines out there) and not choice (you can choose from 26 ways to buy commitments).

Our experience suggest it’s a combination of:

• Time: Organizations have limited time and people with the right skills available to explore and act on recommendations. This is what we do, it’s our dedicated focus and we have the tools to make it manage it efficiently so that we can take it off your hands.
• Risk: Traditional ways of making commitments needs confident forecasting to predict future usage and to avoid wastage. The risk of getting it wrong stops many from taking any action or makes them overly conservative in their commitment management. We have many ways to forecast and reduce risk of commitments so you can confidently access the best savings.
• ROI: Savings achieved must be worth the time and money spent achieving them. Any time and resources spent optimizing cloud cost is time not spent leveraging cloud potential. The losses from this can be far greater than the savings made.

 The result is that organizations pay for flexibility they don’t need or take a simplistic approach that limits future choice.

Yes. 



We follow a Principle of Least Privilege and operate in a way that makes it easy to isolate and audit our activity. We make use of cost and usage metadata only, we need no access to the data within your cloud accounts and do not affect technical cloud operation or configuration.



You may also want to review this security page or the specific access requirements found in the FAQ on each of our Solution pages.

Yes. 



Our approach builds the flexibility to access RI & SP discounts without needing to make commitments on the standard 1 or 3 year terms AWS provides. We achieve this by combining SPs, convertible RIs and standard RIs available on the AWS RI Marketplace. Learn more.

Yes. 



We provide KPIs describing our area of cloud cost management and optimization so you can easily demonstrate cost efficiency over time. We provide a reporting dashboard to display cost and usage trends over time which also allows you to drill-down into usage changes that have impacted your cloud costs. Our team is also on-hand to explore cost anomalies, track your usage against budgets and help you build reporting tools tailored to your needs. Learn more.

Yes.

Cloud cost is the product of what you use and the rates you pay.

Our reporting tools help you see trends in what you’re using and what is driving changes so you have the information to make informed decisions. Learn more.

We reduce the variation in your unit costs (average cost per resource used) by reliably covering your usage with the highest discount rates. Standard approaches to the use of RIs and SPs often result in the overall discount you receive varying from one period to the next depending on where you happen to be in your optimization cycle.

No. Although we have developed in-house tooling to automate many aspects of our optimization approach we still believe there is a role for human supervision and intervention. There are two key reasons for this.

The past is not always an accurate indicator of the future. Historical trends could not predict a decommissioning of an environment you no longer require or the sudden increase in usage caused by a migration from another platform.

At times the cost and usage data can include issues and anomalies that could trigger an inappropriate system response to adjust your RI & SP position. These can be expensive or even impossible to correct retrospectively.

No, not necessarily.

We make the Solution/Sector distinction because that matches our experience of what typically works best for our customers.

There are also occasions where we can offer AWS resale services to Enterprise customers and where we do not need to be the reseller for UK Public Sector.

Our free Savings Review is a great starting to point to understand your environment, preferences and relative value of our solutions to you. You can book a call to discuss your needs.

You will be assigned an Account Manager who will help you make the most of our service. They will be available to answer questions, provide access to our Technical Account Management and Consultancy team as well as pass your feedback on to our Product team for continuous improvement.

Our systems review data every time AWS releases a new version of the CUR. This is typically 3 times a day and our systems will have detected it within 10 minutes of it being available. Commitment changes are made throughout the month when there are persistent changes in usage that can be optimized.

No.

AWS Marketplace was originally set up for ISVs to sell their pure SaaS services. We are an AWS Consulting Partner, as we are offering a tech-enabled service. We do have a Consulting offering on the Marketplace.

No.

We also provide resale with FinOps support for Google Cloud, Azure and IBM. AWS is just the cloud provider for which we have the widest rate optimization service.

Our monthly fee is a percentage of actual RI & SP savings generated in the previous month.

Our free Savings Review provides a fast, simple and secure way to understand what we can save you so you can evaluate it against our fee.

Accelerate is free.

Rather than charge a specific fee for our Accelerate service, we make our money from:

• Solution Provider Program resale discounts from AWS

  These rebates are applied to any reseller and are paid for by AWS, not you. 
• Additional Savings Plans & Reserved Instances savings

  To provide you the discounts, simplicity and ease of management of the Perfect Savings Plan, or our more flexible 3-36 month term tailored Commitments we will make a variety of commitments, when relevant, to AWS in the background. This enables us to take advantage of additional discounts for longer terms or being more specific in the resources we’re committing to. This carries the risk that there will not be usage to match the commitments we’ve made or that we have not made the correct commitments with AWS to provide your Perfect Savings Plan discount. This is generally at our risk. Our team, technology and management strategies help us mitigate this risk.

The impact this has for you is:

• The resale rebates paid by AWS will show up in AWS cost and usage reporting tools. If you have an OGVA spend commitment, the reseller rebate is bundled into the OGVA discount but it still remains paid by AWS and does not impact the rates you actually pay. This is standard AWS practice and remains the same when buying through any reseller.
• Any spend visibility tools based on the AWS cost and usage figures will reflect all the commitments we’ve actually made to AWS. As such they do not accurately reflect the benefits (or reduced lock-in risk) of the commitments you actually own, the Perfect Savings Plan or any of the flexible 3-36 month tailored term Commitments we provide. We calculate these for you and display the results in our Portal, your invoices and backing sheets for transparency.