Cloud Savings Calculator
Estimate optimization potential for your portfolio company's cloud spend
Annual Cloud Spend
Enter your company's total annual cloud infrastructure spend to see estimated optimization potential.
Estimates based on benchmarks from hundreds of PE-backed companies. Actual savings depend on current optimization maturity and architecture.
What this estimates
The calculator applies four optimization ranges to an annual cloud spend figure. Each range is a percentage of total spend, and each carries a confidence level reflecting how deterministic the saving is rather than how large it looks.
Zombie & Unused Resources
High (90%)Unattached volumes, idle load balancers, orphaned snapshots, unused elastic IPs
Right-Sizing
Medium (70%)Over-provisioned instances, databases, and managed services running below 20% utilization
Commitment-Based Pricing
Medium (70%)Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and Enterprise Discount Programs for predictable workloads
Architectural Optimization
Lower (50%)Containerization, serverless migration, storage tiering, and data transfer optimization
Confidence matters more than magnitude. Deleting an unattached volume is arithmetic, so a high-confidence range is close to guaranteed. Re-architecting for serverless might save more, but it depends on the application, the team, and the timeline, which is why architectural work sits at the bottom of the list despite being the most discussed. In diligence, the defensible number is the high-confidence subtotal, not the sum of everything.
How to use it in a deal
Before LOI, the output is a sanity check on whether cloud spend is material enough to move the model. After close, it is a prioritization order: capture the high-confidence categories in the first ninety days to fund the harder work, and treat the lower-confidence ranges as a hypothesis to be tested rather than savings to be booked. The EBITDA figure is the point — cost reduction that reaches EBITDA is the only kind that changes an exit multiple.
Where these numbers come from
The ranges reflect benchmarks across PE-backed companies rather than a single estate. The waste categories are covered in The True Cost of Cloud Waste, the EBITDA mechanics in How Cloud Costs Impact EBITDA, and the commitment-pricing trade-off in Reserved Instances vs On-Demand. For the AI half of the same estate, where cost scales with usage rather than capacity, use the AI cost & margin calculator.