Phase 7 · Asset & Tech Architecture
Cloud Infrastructure Bloat Calculator
Most cloud bills are part compute, part convenience tax, part pure waste. Separate the three — idle instances, egress fees, and the hyperscaler premium — and see what you'd recover.
How much of a cloud bill is actually waste?
Three separable things: compute you provisioned but don't use, egress fees priced far above bandwidth cost, and the hyperscaler premium over equivalent hardware elsewhere. Idle waste is compute × (1 − utilization ÷ 70%) — 70% being a realistic ceiling for healthy utilization, not 100%.
- Worked example (defaults on this page): a $12,000/month bill at 60% compute and 35% utilization carries $3,600 of idle waste — half the compute spend paying for nothing.
- Egress at 20 TB and $0.09/GB is $1,800 a month. A CDN or leaner data path typically cuts that by roughly 90%.
- Right-sizing, then moving that compute to an alternative at 45% of hyperscaler cost, takes the bill to about $4,800 — a $7,200 monthly saving, or 60%.
- Right-size before you migrate. Moving idle instances to a cheaper host just buys the same waste at a discount.
Under the hood
The math, fully exposed
We split the bill, recover the idle compute (right-sizing toward a realistic 70% target), and re-price egress and compute on a leaner host:
Compute spend = bill × compute share
Idle waste = compute spend × (1 − utilization ÷ 70%), floored at 0
Egress cost = egress TB × 1000 × price per GB
Optimized compute = right-sized compute × alternative cost ratio
Optimized egress ≈ 10% of current (leaner bandwidth / CDN)
Savings = current bill − optimized bill
- Right-size before you migrate: recovering idle compute is free and provider-agnostic. We target ~70% utilization rather than 100% so you keep headroom for spikes.
- Egress is the silent line item: at hyperscaler rates, moving data out adds up fast. Leaner hosts and CDNs with cheap or free egress capture most of it.
- Savings aren\'t free: migration takes engineering time and re-creates managed services you\'d lose. Treat this as the recoverable ceiling, and subtract the work and the convenience you actually value.
Your directives
What to do next, based on your numbers
Adjust the sliders to generate tailored recommendations.
Answers
Frequently asked questions
Why is my cloud bill so much higher than expected?
Three usual culprits: over-provisioning (paying for instances that sit mostly idle), egress fees (steep per-GB charges to move data out), and the convenience premium hyperscalers charge for managed services and on-demand capacity. The first two are pure waste you can often recover without leaving your provider; the third is the price of convenience you should pay deliberately, not by default.
What is data egress and why is it so expensive?
Egress is data transferred out of the cloud to the internet or another region. Hyperscalers charge around $0.08–$0.12 per GB for it while charging nothing to bring data in — a deliberate asymmetry that makes leaving costly. At scale it becomes a major, often-overlooked line item, and it's where alternative hosts and CDNs (some with free egress) save the most.
Should I move off AWS to bare metal?
Sometimes — bare metal and lean cloud providers can cost a fraction per unit of raw compute and bandwidth. But the sticker savings ignore real costs: managed databases, autoscaling, security and reliability work you'd rebuild yourself. Migrate workloads that are steady, compute-heavy and egress-heavy; keep on managed services the things where the convenience genuinely earns its premium.
How do I cut cloud costs without migrating?
Start with the free wins: right-size over-provisioned instances, use autoscaling and spot/preemptible capacity for flexible workloads, buy reserved instances or savings plans for steady ones, and put a CDN in front of egress-heavy traffic. These often recover most of the waste this calculator finds — before you ever consider a migration.