Cloud cost optimization, evidence first

Most cloud bills grow faster than anyone’s ability to explain them. A number goes up, a dashboard shows it went up, and then the hard part begins: which service moved, who owns it, whether the change was intentional, and what it would cost — in risk, not just dollars — to unwind. By the time that chain is reconstructed by hand, the month has closed and the next surprise is already forming.

Optimization tools that jump straight to “here is what to delete” skip the part that actually matters: the evidence. A recommendation with no source, no freshness, and no confidence is just a dare. And a tool that acts on that dare automatically is a liability, not a feature. Real cost work needs a shared, trustworthy picture first — and a human in the loop for anything that changes.

CloudJaeger’s first connection is a read-only IAM role with a policy we publish before you connect. Nothing runs on your workloads, no agent is installed, and you can delete the role at any time. From that role we sync your billing data and inventory into one place, so spend by service and region is bill-backed — read from your AWS billing data rather than estimated — and splits by account, checked against the Cost and Usage Report, once you connect one. On our own AWS estate, on the June 2026 bill, that reconciliation landed within about 1% of the Cost and Usage Report; on yours the same check gives a result once your Cost and Usage Report is connected, and names what is missing until then. The production CUR import ran again on 27 September 2026. September’s CUR, through the 26th, agrees with Cost Explorer to the cent; August’s is $17.07 short and under investigation, so the June 2026 check remains the last clean one.

With the bill in view, ownership becomes answerable. Every service resolves to an owner source — configured, inferred, or honestly marked unknown — and unowned spend is shown at the top rather than hidden. That is the difference between a chart that says spend rose and a working picture that says which team’s which service rose, and why.

A lot of cloud cost is decided at design time, not runtime — the instance family, the data transfer path, the redundancy that a workload may not need. CloudJaeger includes a deterministic architecture review that produces pillar findings with severities and a rough-order-of-magnitude cost figure, validated against golden scenarios at every release. It connects the shape of a system to the shape of its bill, so an optimization is a design decision with a dollar figure, not a guess.

Findings from the waste, rightsizing, commitment, anomaly, budget, Kubernetes and AI engines land in one ranked, advisory queue. Each item blends dollar impact, confidence, reversibility, risk, and effort — scored deterministically, with a plain-English rationale. The language model only writes the explanation; it never decides. Every row shows where the number came from, how fresh the underlying data is, and how strong the evidence is, so “safe and easy” can rank ahead of “big and scary”.

Dollar figures are projected. They stay labeled as estimates until a real invoice moves and grades them against your bill — never a promise, and never presented as money already saved. That honesty is the point: an optimization program lives or dies on whether its numbers survive contact with the next invoice.

This build has no execution path: nothing is applied to your cloud, with or without an approval. Approving a recommendation records a decision; nothing is applied. CloudJaeger recommends, and a human decides and makes the change. You get the leverage of a system that has already done the analysis, without handing it the keys to your account.

On cost coverage beyond AWS, we stay precise: AWS runs on real bills today; Azure and Google Cloud sync real cost and inventory, and stay in Preview until checked against a real bill. We would rather label a zero-spend estate as zero than pad a number to look broader than it is.