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We optimize your cloud bill or you don't pay.

Hands-on optimization across your entire stack, done by us, following your process. We take a share of what we actually save you: no retainer, no day rate.

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Founded by a former AWS Specialist Solutions Architect for Spot and Graviton. He created AutoSpotting, the widely-used open-source Spot automation used by teams at Samsung, Expedia and Mozilla.

We work with teams spending $100k+/month (or $1M+/year) on cloud. AWS is our core; Azure and GCP through our specialist network.

How we work

We make low-risk, reversible changes and ship them through your own review and rollout process, and take a share only of what we actually save. The result is a cloud kept lean and efficient for sustainable growth.

  1. 1

    Discovery call

    With the NDA and any paperwork signed up front, a short call to walk through your stack and your goals. It gets the work started on the right priorities.

  2. 2

    Read-only access

    You grant scoped, read-only access at first, so we can start analyzing your setup in detail. No standing admin, minimal IAM, only expanding whenever needed to do the work.

  3. 3

    First changes in your repo

    We open pull requests in your repositories, usually within days of getting access. They follow your process, stay low risk and reversible. Any re-architecting is rare and discussed in advance.

  4. 4

    Weekly sync

    A 30-minute weekly sync with one engineer on your side, where we bring the few top-priority changes to tackle next, not a backlog to get through. That sync plus occasional PR reviews is your team's entire time investment, so they stay focused on your product while staying in sync with what is done.

  5. 5

    First measured savings

    Changes land and the effect shows up on your bill in the same billing period.

We work with your security and procurement process. Everyone who touches your account is under NDA, and we are happy to sign your MSA and DPA, complete your security reviews, and provide references under NDA. Billing is automated from your before-and-after cost data, so what you pay always ties back to the real bill.

The money is not in one big line item, but in two hundred small ones.

Most of what we find is small. A few hundred dollars a month each, low risk, with no migration project or major architecture change. Individually, none of them justify pulling an engineer off the roadmap for half a day to research, execute and verify.

That is exactly why they never get done. The arithmetic does not work for them.

It works for us, because we automated it.

Every change is prepared with help from our comprehensive tooling and still ships as a pull request through your own review. What costs your engineer half a day costs us half an hour.

40 small optimizations, averaging $250 a month each.
Individually: not worth a half day of engineering time.
Together: $10,000 a month. $120,000 a year.
Manually, at half a day each: 20 engineering days, spread across people who have other jobs.
For us: a few days, mostly automated, and you pay only out of what it saves.

The long tail of small savingsA few large savings on the left, and a wide band of many small savings on the right whose combined area is larger.Headline winsThe long tail (bigger in total)
Illustrative: the small wins add up to more than the headline items.

Our own tooling does the heavy lifting

We invest heavily in automation. Over many engagements, we have built and battle-tested a broad set of tools that cover most common optimization scenarios end to end, from detection and safety checks to execution and measurement.

Because that tooling is already built, we usually deliver better results, faster, than one of your engineers doing the same work by hand. And we keep capturing the small wins that are never worth an engineer's time.

This is still a service, productized by the use of tooling, not replaced by it. We never let the tooling act unassisted, and we carefully monitor what it does.

Our Engagement Models

Done with You

We work side by side with your team to optimize your cloud costs together

  • We show your team what we do and help them adopt an efficiency mindset
  • Your team participates in implementation decisions
  • Your team keeps the knowledge behind each optimization
  • Changes follow your existing review and rollout process
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Done for You

We offload as much as possible of the hands-on optimization work

  • The hands-on work happens in your repos
  • We handle the analysis, implementation and measurement
  • Your engineers review changes instead of researching them
  • Weekly syncs show what landed, what it saved and what is next
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Why we do not bill by the hour

A day rate pays for effort. We prefer to work on results because it aligns our incentives with yours: we only make money when you save money.

It also keeps us working long after other models would stop. A subscription vendor is effectively done once you sign, and a consultant on a day rate once the days run out, whereas we keep going until there is nothing profitable left to find. Because our automation makes even the small wins worth capturing, that point stays a long way off.

Results

Anonymised by industry and spend band. Every number measured against the bill before the change.

FinTech scale-up, US

$1.1M+/yr

delivered cost avoidance

~$3M/year AWS under an EDP. In the first two weeks we shipped ~$378k/year of savings, enough to cover our entire fee within a few months. Then IO1 to GP3, right-configured Aurora, RIs, ElastiCache to Valkey and more.

E-commerce SaaS, US

~30%

off the bill, ~$178k/yr

A bill growing with the business, from $30k to $50k/month. Cut to $36k/month in 3-4 months across RDS, compute, ElastiCache, S3 and EBS.

Marketing/compliance SaaS, US

$300k/yr

identified in a review

~$1M/year AWS. A prioritised list across S3, RDS, ECS+Spot, EBS and CloudWatch Logs, for the team to implement at their own pace.

Every engagement is under NDA, so client names and identifying details are anonymised; references are available under NDA. More detail on the case studies page.

What the billing actually looks like

We take a share of the savings, typically 10% to 30%, sized to the footprint under our optimization scope (larger footprints pay a lower share).

Here is how a 20% share plays out, change by change.

Chart: the savings you keep grow to about $92k a month, while our 20% cut ramps up as changes land and back down as each change's first year ends, working out to about 10% of the savings delivered while billing

A real, anonymised engagement: a FinTech spending ~$3M/year, where the changes we shipped now save about $92,000 a month (~$1.1M/year).

~10%

of the savings we deliver while billing

~$1.1M/yr

you keep, for good, once cuts retire

Each change is billed at your agreed share for its first 12 months, then retires: from then on you keep 100% of that change's savings. It is invoiced monthly and measured automatically from your before-and-after billing data, per change. The cut ramps up as changes land and back down as they retire. Across the whole billing period, it works out to about 10% of the savings we deliver, then it goes to zero while the savings stay.

We can also bill through AWS Marketplace, and will agree a cap if you want one. It typically costs less than a FinOps SaaS subscription. We work with teams spending $100k+/month on cloud.

About LeanerCloud

LeanerCloud is led by Cristian Magherusan-Stanciu, who founded it in 2022 after years at AWS, most recently as a Specialist Solutions Architect for Spot and Graviton. He runs every engagement himself. When the work calls for it, he brings in a handpicked network of freelance specialists with decades of combined AWS experience.

We help our clients achieve a lean and efficient cloud environment for sustainable growth. We aim to offer deep, comprehensive cloud optimization at fair, customer-obsessed prices. AWS is our core, and we cover Azure and GCP through specialists in our network. We're always open to talented cloud professionals interested in joining us.

Cristian Magherusan-Stanciu

Cristian Magherusan-Stanciu

Cloud Optimization Specialist

LinkedIn Join us

We often share insights and learnings through our podcast and YouTube channel.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about working with LeanerCloud

What size client do you work with?

We work best with teams spending at least $100k a month, or $1M a year, on cloud. Below that, a hands-on engagement usually is not worth it, and self-serve automation is a better fit. We can also refer you to partners who take on smaller clients.

Why not just do this in-house?

You can, and some teams do. But it means finding an engineer with current pricing knowledge across a dozen services, keeping that knowledge fresh as AWS changes, and spending their time going instance by instance instead of shipping product. Cost work usually loses that trade-off, gets done once, then decays. Keeping current on this is our full-time job, not a side quest for your team, and you only pay out of what we actually save.

What share of the savings do you take?

We prefer to charge on results because it keeps our incentives aligned with yours. Typically 10% to 30% of the savings, sized to the footprint under our optimization scope, with larger footprints paying a lower share. It applies for the first year after each change lands, and is measured per change. We can agree a cap if you want one. It usually costs less than a FinOps SaaS subscription.

What if you do not save us anything?

Then you pay nothing. We are paid as a share of savings measured against your real bill, so a change that does not save money is not charged for.

Which cloud providers do you cover?

AWS is our core and where we have the deepest expertise. Our founder spent years at AWS as a Specialist Solutions Architect for Spot and Graviton, and has over 12 years of experience with AWS. We also cover Azure and GCP through specialists in our network.

Is this just about cutting costs?

No. A lower bill is one visible outcome, but the bigger win is efficiency: getting more capacity, performance, and reliability out of each dollar you spend.

What if the bill doesn't drop because we're growing?

For fast-growing customers, the absolute bill often keeps rising simply because the business is growing. But the cost per customer or per transaction drops, so the spend turns into more value rather than waste.

How much access do you need?

Read-only first, so we can produce the prioritised list. Then scoped write access per change, with minimal IAM and no standing admin. Every change goes through your own review and rollout process.

How do you handle security and procurement?

We work with your process. Read-only access first, then least-privilege, per-change write access with no standing admin. And everyone who touches your account works under NDA. We are happy to sign your MSA and DPA, complete your security reviews and questionnaires, and provide references under NDA. Every engagement is under NDA, which is why our case studies are anonymised.

How is savings measured?

Automatically, from your actual before-and-after billing data: per change, against the bill before that change, over an attribution window we agree up front. Because billing is driven by the real bill rather than an estimate, there is nothing hand-wavy about it, and we report weekly what landed and what each change saved.

What if we already have a FinOps tool?

Keep it. A tool finds things; we fix them. It can feed our backlog, and you still only pay us for what actually lands on your bill.

How is this different from hiring a consultant?

A consultant on a day rate advises while your engineers implement, and you pay for the hours whether or not anything lands on your bill. We do the work ourselves, in your repos and through your process, and we are paid on results. So our incentive is to keep finding savings, including the small ones an hourly engagement would skip.

What if we already bought commitments?

We work around them, and convertible Reserved Instances can often be exchanged. We size any new commitments (and, where it fits, an Enterprise Discount Program or private pricing agreement) against your footprint after optimization, not before.

Why not just buy a Savings Plan?

Commitments are the easy win, an afternoon of work, but they only ever cover part of the bill. Storage, logging and networking are not covered by any Savings Plan or Reserved Instance, so they only get cheaper when someone optimizes them. We go through the whole stack first, then size commitments to the footprint you will actually run, not the one you happen to run today. That way you do not lock in years of paying for resources we would have removed.

What if a change causes an incident?

Changes are low risk by selection, reversible, made in your repository and behind your review, with a rollback defined per change. Major architecture changes are rare, and we do not touch anything that is not worth the risk. If something does go wrong we are on hand to help, and we carry insurance to cover damages.

What happens when you leave?

The savings are already in your infrastructure, and the self-hosted tooling stays yours. You do not need an ongoing subscription to keep those benefits. If you want continued coverage, our continuity program keeps monitoring your setup for drift and new optimization opportunities after the engagement. It costs a fraction of what a full-time employee would.

How do we get started?

Book a discovery call to get started. We take read-only access and give you a prioritised list of what we found and what it is worth, whether or not you go on to work with us.

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