How much can I realistically save on my cloud bill?
It depends on how much optimization has already been done. Teams that have never rightsized or bought commitments often find the largest savings; mature FinOps teams find less. This estimator uses conservative rates well under the providers' maximums, so treat the high end as achievable rather than guaranteed.
Savings plans or reserved instances: which is better?
On AWS, Compute Savings Plans are the most flexible, applying across instance families, regions and services such as Fargate and Lambda, with a slightly smaller discount than EC2 Instance Savings Plans or Reserved Instances. Azure and Google Cloud offer similar commitment options. Commit only to the steady baseline that remains after rightsizing.
Is it safe to use spot instances?
Yes, for work that can be interrupted and retried: batch processing, CI builds, rendering, data pipelines and stateless services behind a load balancer with enough capacity elsewhere. Spot capacity can be reclaimed at short notice, so it is not suitable for single databases or stateful services without careful design.
What is rightsizing?
Matching instance types and sizes to what workloads actually use. It relies on a few weeks of CPU, memory and network metrics, and often includes moving to newer instance generations that give more performance per dollar.
How does scheduling non-production environments save money?
Development and test environments are often only used in working hours. Stopping them at night and at weekends cuts their running hours by more than half. Infrastructure as code makes it easy to recreate whole environments on demand instead of leaving them running.
Does storage tiering affect performance?
It can. Colder tiers cost less to store but may add retrieval fees or latency. Intelligent tiering services move objects automatically based on access, which suits data with unknown or changing access patterns. Lifecycle rules suit predictable data such as logs and backups.
Does this work for Azure and Google Cloud?
Yes. The levers are the same on every major provider: rightsizing, scheduling, spot or preemptible capacity, commitment discounts and storage tiers. The source figures in the assumptions table are AWS's because it publishes clear maximums.
Why are network and database costs not included?
They vary too much by architecture to estimate from a total. Data transfer, managed databases and licences can hold real savings, but finding them needs a look at your actual bill and workloads.
How long does a cloud cost optimization take?
Quick wins such as deleting idle resources and scheduling environments often land in the first weeks. Rightsizing needs a few weeks of metrics, and commitments are best bought once usage has settled at its new, lower level.
Can Nexzem review our cloud bill?
Yes. We review AWS, Azure and Google Cloud accounts, deliver the savings and set up the tagging, budgets and reporting that keep them. Start on the contact page or read about our managed cloud services.