Cost Management Services
Our Services
If you’re staring at your AWS bill wondering what’s going on, you’re not alone. Our cloud cost management experts help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying.
AWS Bill First Pass
- Compressed version of our deep-dive Cost Optimization Project
- A single day engagement for discussions with your team
- A report with quick, actionable advice
You’d be surprised what you can get done in a single day when all you do is work on AWS bills.
AWS Cost Optimization
- Lower your AWS bill with our 100% Money-Back Guaranteed cost optimization services
- Keep Engineering on-task.
- Take action sooner rather than later.
Did we mention we literally guarantee we’ll find places you can save?
AWS Contract Negotiation
- Stop paying retail prices on AWS
- Identify what a great deal looks like (for finance and engineering)
- Have us liaise, advocate, and negotiate with Amazon on your behalf
We’ll get right to the heart of what you want from your partnership with AWS.
We’ve fixed enough AWS bills to create a few strongly held beliefs on what makes a company great at cloud cost management — and how to help organizations reach a higher level of cloud cost maturity over time. These principles and practices guide us in building our cost management services and throughout our work with our clients.
Our Approach
Architect
Your organization’s unique architectural ecosystem is the main driver for your cloud costs. As your understanding of your architecture grows (and as AWS services change), you can better identify where to adapt your cloud usage to decrease spend.
Allocate
When your organization can see where your AWS costs are going along business lines, you understand the context for that cost and move from a vague pain around your bill to making informed decisions about engineering investments, cost optimization efforts, and budget forecasts.
Invest
Pre-purchasing resources and negotiating your AWS contracts are great ways to save money on resources you’re committed to having. To achieve maximum savings, you need to ensure that your organization has effective practices and processes in place around these resources.
Predict
Effectively tracking unit costs allows for accurately forecasting your AWS spend. Defining and tracking your unit costs is important to be able to understand your infrastructure’s cost drivers and the interplay between cloud costs and actual usage.
Our Philosophy
Software plus people is
the only workable answer.
Cost optimization is a problem requiring human expertise and attention. Software can make some parts of the job easier, but it can’t replace the human. Simply put, there’s no API for business insight.
We want you to be badass
at cloud cost management
We don’t want you to be reliant on our cost management services forever. We want you to thrive with a solid foundation, mechanisms for understanding your cost drivers and goals, and a way to have cloud cost be a part of achieving your business outcomes.
The Duckbill Group came highly recommended, yet exceeded all
our expectations. Mike and Corey know more about how AWS billing works than anyone else in the world, including all of AWS. In just a few weeks they helped us reclaim 10% of our entire operating budget.
Best contracting money I have ever spent. First Pass
If you’d like an AWS billing expert to look at your AWS bill and architecture, but you’re not quite ready for the eight week deep dive of our Cost Optimization Project, First Pass is just the thing for you.
- Our team reviews your organization’s AWS costs and any architecture diagrams you share with us.
- We plan a single day meeting with our AWS billing experts and as many people from your team as you’d like.
- We create a summary report of what we discussed and our findings and recommendations. We schedule a meeting and present this report to your team and answer any questions you have within three business days of finishing our initial meeting with your team.
- We don’t do implementation of our findings, but we’ll tell you everything you need to know in order to fix it yourself.
Choose First Pass to:
- Meet with our AWS billing experts in a single day engagement.
- Receive a report with quick, actionable advice.
You’d be surprised what you can get done in a single day when all you do is work on AWS bills.
One-Time Cost Optimization Project
With a Cost Optimization project, you’ll be able to:
- Address what’s in your AWS environment today
(in a way that accounts for both the technical and financial perspectives) - Help your teams understand their cost drivers
- Identify all the actionable mechanisms
to optimize costs in your environment
You’ll receive a succinct report with 5-8 “big win” optimizations to reduce your bill. We typically identify savings between 15% and 20% reduction-over-spend, with a payback period of anywhere between one and three months. You and your team can implement these recommendations quickly— so quickly, in fact, that you’ll likely see the effects on your very next bill.
Choose Cost Optimization to:
- Lower your AWS bill. Guaranteed.
- Keep Engineering on-task.
- Take action sooner rather than later.
Did we mention we guarantee we’ll find savings?
AWS Contract Negotiation
EDP, PPA, and MAP contract discounts represent hundreds of thousands (to millions) of dollars in potential savings for your organization. Given the stakes, expert guidance is well worth it.
We’ve consulted on a number of these negotiations for companies of a wide range of spend. We see more AWS contract negotiations than many AWS Account Managers see (we review 2-4 of these contracts each month, on average). That means when we negotiate on your behalf with AWS, we know what to say to ensure you end up with favorable contracts and custom discount terms.
When we’re involved, these contract negotiations go smoother and finish faster, which means there’s less headache for you, AND you get to use your new discounts sooner. Our involvement can be leading the negotiation or being the people behind the curtain, to your preference.
Choose Contract Negotiation to:
- Stop paying retail prices on AWS
- Identify what a great deal looks like (from both the finance and engineering perspectives)
- Have us liaise, advocate, and negotiate with Amazon on your behalf
We’ll get right to the heart of what you want from your partnership with AWS.
You can get AWS consulting from just about anywhere here in San Francisco. But with The Duckbill Group, you get white-glove, concierge level, bend-over-backward service, and excellent communication. You pay for results with a one-time fee, regardless of what it takes on their side. You know exactly what it’s going to cost and what you’re going to get out of it instead of eating hourly consulting fees. That’s a lot of peace of mind. 
