Pre-Exit Cloud Cost Audit
Find the cloud cost problems a buyer's diligence team would find, early enough to fix them instead of discount for them
A buyer's diligence team will find your cloud waste. The only question is whether you found it first.
I help PE operating partners and portfolio company CTOs find and fix cloud cost problems before a buyer's diligence team finds them and uses them to negotiate the price down. Every unexplained dollar in that line is a dollar someone else gets to characterize — as undisciplined operations, as a margin structure that does not hold at scale, as a reason the model was optimistic.
This is not a cost report. Cost reports are cheap and mostly unread. What is scarce is the judgment about which findings a deal team will seize on, which are immaterial, and which have to be fixed in a specific order because the expensive ones take four quarters rather than four weeks. The deliverable is a defensible position going into a process, not a list of expensive resources.
The same work applies to the newest line on the bill: AI and inference spend is where the margin question gets asked hardest, and a buyer underwriting an AI premium will look there first. Grounded in years as a Principal Solutions Architect at AWS in a Field CTO capacity, and in the research behind Cloud Economics for Private Equity, the benchmarks come from PE-backed companies rather than general cloud users — which is what makes a finding either normal or a red flag.
Who This Is For
PE Operating Partners
You own a value creation plan with an exit inside it, and cloud is a line on the P&L that has been drifting up while nobody owned it. You need to know what a buyer's diligence team will find, early enough to fix it, and written in language your deal team can put in front of an investment committee without translating it first.
Portfolio Company CTOs
You already suspect where the waste is. What you do not have is an outside number attached to it, a defensible reason to spend engineering cycles on it instead of the roadmap, and a story that survives an hour with someone paid to be skeptical of it. An outside assessment gives you all three, and gives the sponsor a reason to fund the fix.
This is a fit when
- Sponsor-owned or PE-backed, with an exit anticipated in the next 12 to 36 months
- Cloud, data platform, and inference spend running at $500K a year or more
- Infrastructure is a meaningful share of cost of revenue, so waste lands in gross margin and shows up in the multiple
- Someone will be asked in diligence to explain the trend in that line, and does not yet have a good answer
This is not a fit when
- Cloud spend is small enough that even the best case does not move EBITDA — the audit would cost more than it returns
- What you actually want is a FinOps tool selected, rolled out, and staffed. That is an implementation engagement, not an audit
- The company is still pre-product-market-fit and the architecture will be rebuilt before anyone buys it
- You are already in the data room. At that point I can help you defend the number, but not change it
If the discovery call establishes that this is the wrong engagement, I will say so and point you at the right one — including when the right one is nothing at all.
When to Run It
The most common objection is that an exit two or three years out makes this premature. It is the opposite: the findings worth the most money are the ones that take the longest to fix.
Early, but not wasted
Findings feed the value creation plan rather than a remediation scramble. The architectural items — the ones worth the most and taking the longest — are still cheap to change at this distance.
The right window
Long enough to execute the fixes and let the improved unit economics land in trailing financials, which is the only form in which a buyer will actually credit them. This is where the audit pays for itself several times over.
Still worth doing
The quick wins are all in play and most right-sizing work completes inside a quarter. The architectural findings become a documented plan you hand to the buyer instead of a problem the buyer discovers.
A defense brief
Too late to change the numbers, early enough to control the narrative. You go into diligence knowing every finding they will raise, with a written answer for each. Useful — but it is the most expensive version of this work you can buy.
What the Audit Covers
- Committed spend and discount posture — reservations, savings plans, and private pricing against what your consumption profile actually justifies
- Zombie and orphaned resources, quantified at high confidence because they are the findings nobody argues with
- Right-sizing across compute, storage, and data platform, with the performance headroom you would be giving up stated honestly
- Inference and model spend, which is the fastest-growing line on most bills and the one a buyer will press hardest on
- Architectural cost drivers — the design decisions that make the bill grow faster than revenue, which is what a diligence team actually looks for
- Unit economics: cost per customer, per transaction, per inference, and the direction each has moved over the last eight quarters
- Tagging, allocation, and cost governance — whether you can even answer a buyer’s questions, which is itself a diligence finding
- The gap between what your engineering team believes the infrastructure costs and what it costs
What You Get
One written report, scoped around three things. Two to three weeks, fixed fee, agreed before any work begins.
Quantified waste
Every finding carries a dollar figure and a confidence level — 90 percent for zombie resources, 70 percent for right-sizing, 50 percent for architectural change. Nothing is presented as certain that is not, because a number you have to walk back in diligence is worse than no number.
A remediation roadmap
Prioritized by return against engineering effort, sequenced against your exit timeline, and specific enough that your engineering team can start on Monday without another discovery phase. Each item carries a cost, a timeline, and who has to do it.
A partner-ready summary
The findings expressed as EBITDA impact and valuation exposure, in the terms an operating partner uses at a board meeting and a deal team uses at a negotiating table. No translation layer required, and nothing in it that a technical reader would call overstated.
The fee is scoped on the discovery call and fixed before work starts — no hourly billing and no scope creep. The comparison worth making is not against a consulting budget but against what a six-figure line of flagged waste does to an exit multiple once a buyer has found it first.
How the Audit Works
Discovery call
Thirty minutes on the situation, the hold period, and the shape of the estate. If the spend is not large enough to justify the work, or the timing makes it pointless, I will tell you on that call rather than sell you an engagement.
Scope and access
Fixed fee agreed before anything begins. Access is read-only billing and cost management data plus a handful of architecture conversations — typically four to six hours of your engineering team's time across the whole engagement, not a standing workshop.
Analysis
Two to three weeks. Spend and utilization data against benchmarks from PE-backed companies rather than general cloud users, architecture reviewed for the cost drivers that compound, and every finding pressure-tested against how a buyer's diligence team would read it.
Report and readout
The written report, plus a live session with whichever audience needs it — engineering, the CEO, or the sponsor. Some clients bring me back on retainer to help execute the roadmap or to stay engaged through the deal. That is a separate decision, made after you have the report.
Common Questions
Can't a cost management tool do this for less?
Those tools tell you what is expensive. They do not tell you why it is expensive, whether fixing it is worth the engineering time, or how a buyer’s diligence team will interpret it. I use those tools — they are part of the process, not a competitor to it. What the audit adds is judgment: which findings actually move valuation, which are noise, and a narrative your operating partner can hand to a deal team without translating it first. You are not paying for a dashboard. You are paying for what the dashboard means and what to do about it before someone else reads it first.
Why you rather than a large consulting firm?
A large firm staffs a team of junior consultants with a partner who appears twice. This is one person with direct pattern-matching across hundreds of PE-backed companies — from years as a Principal Solutions Architect at AWS in a Field CTO capacity, and from the research behind Cloud Economics for Private Equity, which covers 127 portfolio companies analyzed and 73 private equity professionals interviewed. The person you meet on the discovery call is the person who does the work and writes the report.
We already have an internal team working on cloud cost. Why do we need this?
Good — that means the operational muscle already exists, and the roadmap will land somewhere that can execute it. What internal teams usually lack is the outside perspective a buyer's diligence team will bring, and the bandwidth to do a dedicated pass while running the business day to day. This does not replace your team. It shows you what your team's work looks like through a buyer's eyes, before the buyer does it for you.
How is this different from the technical due diligence you do for buyers?
Same analysis, opposite side of the table. Buy-side diligence exists to find the reasons a price should come down. This exists to make sure those reasons are already fixed, or already disclosed with a plan attached, by the time anyone goes looking. I work both sides, but never on the same deal or the same company for opposing parties.
What does the audit cost?
A fixed fee, scoped on the discovery call and agreed before any work starts. No hourly billing, no scope creep, and no invoice you did not see coming. The number worth weighing it against is not your consulting budget — it is what a single six-figure line of flagged waste does to an exit multiple, and how much of that a buyer will try to price in once they have found it themselves.
We're not selling for another two or three years. Is this too early?
That is close to ideal timing. Architecture problems take months to fix once you have decided what to change, and an improvement only counts at the table once it sits in your trailing financials. Twelve to twenty-four months out gives you time to execute the fixes and show the better numbers, instead of scrambling in the final quarter before a process. The audit that happens the month before the data room opens is a disclosure exercise, not a value creation one.
What exactly do we get at the end?
A written report scoped around three things: quantified waste with dollar figures and confidence levels, a prioritized remediation roadmap your engineering team can execute against, and a summary a non-technical partner can use in board or deal conversations. Some clients bring me back on retainer to help implement the fixes or to stay engaged through the deal process. That is optional and priced separately — it is not bundled into the audit, and nothing in the report depends on you buying it.
Can you guarantee a specific savings number?
No, and be careful with anyone who does before seeing your environment. Every estate is different, and a number promised in a sales conversation is a number somebody has to walk back later — which is exactly the credibility problem the audit exists to prevent. What is committed is a rigorous, documented process and a report you can act on the week you receive it. In practice this work has not yet come back empty.
How much of our engineering team's time does this take?
Typically four to six hours across the engagement — read-only access to billing and cost management data, plus a handful of architecture conversations with the people who know why things were built the way they were. The point is to avoid a standing workshop that pulls the team off the roadmap for three weeks. If the estate is unusually complex, that is established on the discovery call rather than discovered halfway through.
Find it before the buyer does
Book a free 30-minute discovery call. We'll cover where you are in the hold period, what the estate looks like, and whether an audit is worth doing at all.
Schedule a Call