The lift-and-shift hangover
Virtual machines sized for a peak that arrives twice a year, running around the clock. Dev and test environments that never sleep. Licences carried over from on-premises without anyone asking if they are still needed.
Boutique cloud cost & modernization partner
Trim the cloud bill.
Keep the ambition.
Cloud Trimmer helps leadership teams pay less for cloud while their platforms get faster, sturdier and easier to scale. We replatform, refactor and rearchitect your applications into cloud-native services, then run them for you.
- 30–45%
- typical reduction in monthly cloud run-rate
- 99.99%
- availability target on platforms we rearchitect
- 15 min
- P1 response, 24/7, from an engineer who knows your stack
Monthly cloud spend, first 12 months
Illustrative engagement
Spend before
Spend after
Trimmed spend
Projected without changes
- Azure · AWS · Google Cloud
- FinOps-certified practitioners
- Kubernetes-certified engineers
- SOC 2 Type II operations
Where the money goes
Most cloud bills still pay for the data centre you left behind.
Industry surveys consistently put avoidable spend at roughly a quarter to a third of the average cloud bill. Very little of it is a pricing problem. It is an architecture problem.
Monoliths that scale as one block
When one busy feature needs more capacity, the whole application gets it. You pay to scale checkout, reporting and the admin console together, even though only one of them is under load.
Resilience bought twice
A second region built as an idle copy doubles infrastructure cost and still takes hours to fail over. Done properly, every region carries live traffic and the redundancy pays its own way.
Our approach
Three levels of change. We recommend the shallowest one that gets you there.
Every workload gets a disposition based on business value, cost to run and cost to change. Some only need a new home. Some need a new shape. A few deserve a new design.
Replatform
Move to managed services without rewriting.
- VMs to managed containers and app platforms
- Self-run databases to managed, zone-redundant tiers
- Autoscaling and schedules in place of fixed capacity
- Commitment and licence strategy reset
Effort
Savings potential
Resilience gain
20–30%typical savings
6–12 wkstypical timeline
Refactor
Reshape the code that drives the bill.
- Split hot paths into independently scaled services
- Serverless functions for spiky and scheduled work
- Caching, queues and async processing to flatten peaks
- Unit-cost telemetry per feature and per customer
Effort
Savings potential
Resilience gain
30–45%typical savings
3–6 motypical timeline
Rearchitect
Design for the business you are becoming.
- Domain-aligned microservices with clear ownership
- Event-driven integration in place of point-to-point calls
- Active-active deployment across regions
- Platform engineering so teams ship without tickets
Effort
Savings potential
Resilience gain
40–60%typical savings
6–12 mophased delivery
Savings are measured against your pre-engagement monthly run-rate for the workloads in scope. We fund the deeper levels from the savings of the earlier ones wherever we can, so the program pays for itself as it goes. Timelines are dependant on cooperation.
What we build
Highly available, elastic and geo-redundant by default.
The end state is a cloud-native platform of small, independently deployable services. It scales each part of the business on its own and keeps running when a whole region does not.
99.99%availability target
< 15 minrecovery time (RTO)
< 5 mindata loss window (RPO)
0 → peakautoscaling per service
- Every region earns its keep. Traffic is served from all regions at once, so resilience adds capacity instead of idle cost.
- Scale what is busy. Each service scales on its own signal, from zero overnight to peak in seconds.
- Infrastructure as code throughout. Every environment is reproducible, reviewed and auditable.
- Cloud-native, not cloud-locked. Open standards such as Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry keep your options open.
Outcomes
Measured in the numbers your board already reads.
We report in business terms: cost per transaction, recovery time and release speed. Infrastructure metrics stay with the engineers.
| Measure | Typical starting point | Typical after 12 months | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly cloud run-rate | $430k | $258k | −40% |
| Infrastructure cost per 1,000 transactions | $1.84 | $0.71 | −61% |
| Recovery from a full region outage | 4–6 hours | under 15 min | −95% |
| Headroom for peak demand | 1.5× baseline | 10× baseline | +567% |
| Production releases | monthly | daily | ~20× faster |
Replatform, then refactor the settlement engine
A batch-heavy monolith on oversized VMs moved to managed containers, with settlement split into event-driven services.
- −38%
- run-rate
- 9 min
- failover, from 4 hours
- 7 mo
- to full savings
Rearchitect for active-active in two regions
Tenant isolation, per-tenant unit costs and a second live region that replaced a cold standby.
- −46%
- run-rate
- 99.995%
- measured uptime
- 11 mo
- phased program
Serverless for seasonal peaks
Tracking and label generation moved to functions and queues, so holiday peaks no longer set the year-round baseline.
- −52%
- off-season spend
- 12×
- peak headroom
- 14 wk
- to production
Profiles and figures are composites that reflect typical results. Named client references are available under NDA.
Managed services
We stay after go-live, and so do the savings.
Savings erode when nobody owns them. Our managed service keeps your platform lean, secure and reliable, with a named team that already knows how it was built.
FinOps & cost governance
Weekly anomaly review, commitment management, tagging policy and unit-cost dashboards for finance and engineering.
Anomalies flagged within 24 h24/7 site reliability
Monitoring, on-call and incident command against agreed service-level objectives, with blameless reviews after every P1.
P1 response in 15 minSecurity posture
Continuous configuration scanning, identity hygiene, patching and evidence collection for SOC 2, ISO 27001 and PCI audits.
Critical findings fixed in 72 hPlatform engineering
Golden paths, CI/CD pipelines and self-service environments so product teams ship without waiting on infrastructure.
New environment in under 1 hCapacity & resilience testing
Load tests before launches and quarterly region-failover drills, so recovery targets are proven rather than assumed.
Failover drilled every quarterExecutive reporting
A monthly one-page brief for your leadership team and a quarterly review with our principal, written for the board pack.
Brief by the 5th business dayHow an engagement runs
Four weeks to a number you can take to the board.
-
Weeks 1–4 · fixed fee
Cost diagnostic
Read-only access to billing and telemetry. We map spend to applications and business capabilities and size the opportunity.
Savings opportunity, ranked by value and effort, with a business case.
-
Weeks 5–12
Blueprint
Target architecture, a replatform, refactor or rearchitect disposition for every workload, and a sequenced roadmap.
Roadmap with savings milestones and a fixed-fee price for each phase.
-
3–12 months
Transform
Delivery in short phases, quick wins first. Each phase ends with production changes and verified savings on the bill.
Live services, runbooks and a trained internal team.
-
Ongoing
Run & optimize
Our managed service keeps costs, reliability and security on target, and keeps finding the next saving.
Monthly executive brief, quarterly review with our principal.
Savings estimator
See what your bill could look like.
A first approximation from four inputs. The cost diagnostic replaces it with a figure built from your actual billing data.
All providers combined, before any discounts you already receive.
Workloads moved as-is rather than built for the cloud.
Savings plans, reserved instances or committed-use discounts.
Estimated annual savings
$0
per month
0%of current spend60%
Replatform & refactor VM workloads–
Optimize cloud-native workloads–
Commitment strategy–
Schedule non-production–
Ranges use our typical results by workload type and are capped at 55% of spend. Monthly figures shown as annual equivalents. Not a quote.
Why a boutique
We are not the cheapest firm you could hire. We aim to be the one that pays for itself fastest.
Cloud Trimmer is deliberately small. Our rates sit slightly above the large integrators, and in return you get senior people, direct access to the principal, and a team that treats your bill like its own.
14 clients at a time
A capped roster
We limit how many clients we take on so every account gets senior attention. When we are full, we keep a waitlist.
Principal-led
No bait and switch
The architects who scope your work are the ones who deliver it. Our principal joins every quarterly review.
3× guarantee
The diagnostic pays for itself
If the diagnostic does not identify annual savings of at least three times its fee, you do not pay for it.
Your code, your IP
No lock-in
Everything we build lives in your repositories and your accounts. Leave whenever you like and keep it all.
One channel
A named team
A shared channel with the engineers on your account. No ticket queue for the things that matter.
Savings verified
On the invoice, not the slide
We report savings from your provider invoices, reconciled monthly with your finance team.
Engagements
Clear scope. Fixed fees where we can.
Most clients start with the diagnostic. Its fee is credited against the first transformation phase.
Cost diagnostic
$24,000 fixed fee
- Four weeks, read-only access
- Spend mapped to applications and business capabilities
- Ranked savings opportunities with a business case
- Board-ready summary, presented in person
- Covered by the 3× guarantee
Modernization program
Fixed fee per phase
- Replatform, refactor and rearchitect delivery
- Phases priced up front from the blueprint
- Savings milestones written into each phase
- Knowledge transfer to your engineers
- Optional savings-share pricing
Managed cloud
$9,500 / month, from
- 24/7 SRE with 15-minute P1 response
- FinOps, security posture and patching
- Quarterly failover drills
- Monthly executive brief
- Scales with your footprint, reviewed yearly
Executive briefings
Short reads for leadership teams.
Written for executives who need the decision, not the deep dive. Available on request.
Questions we hear
Before you call.
If yours is not here, ask it on the call. We would rather answer it early.
Will this disrupt our customers or our roadmap?
Changes ship in small phases behind feature flags and gradual traffic shifts, with rollback ready at every step. We plan around your release calendar and your peak seasons, and most of the work is invisible to customers.
Which clouds do you work with?
Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, including multi-cloud estates. We favour open, portable technology such as Kubernetes, Terraform and OpenTelemetry, so the architecture is not tied to one provider.
Why pay a premium over a large integrator?
Because the people who scope the work deliver it, and the savings arrive sooner. Our fees are typically recovered within the first few months of savings, and the diagnostic carries a 3× guarantee.
Can you work alongside our engineering team?
Yes, and we prefer to. We pair with your engineers, build in your repositories and leave behind runbooks and training, so your team owns the result.
How do you handle security and compliance?
We work under least-privilege access, operate SOC 2 Type II controls and sign your security and confidentiality terms before any access is granted. We can produce audit evidence for SOC 2, ISO 27001 and PCI DSS.
Do you offer savings-based pricing?
For modernization programs, yes. Part of our fee can be tied to verified savings on your provider invoices. We will recommend it where the baseline is clear enough to measure fairly.
Book a cost diagnostic
Start with a 30-minute conversation.
Tell us where you are. A principal will reply within one business day to set up a call, with no slide deck and no obligation.
Emailhello@cloudtrimmer.com