A cloud assessment that ends in money, not in a score, with the term each discount costs
Six areas decide what your cloud costs. On two of them the result is a figure in money; on the other four we say why it does not and what the next concrete step is. You also see what happens if you need to leave a commitment before its term, with each cloud's percentage taken from the vendor's own documentation.
No sign-up to get this far. The diagnostic is optional.
An order-of-magnitude estimate, not a measurement of your operation. Two of the six areas receive a value in money because they can be estimated from what you reported. The other four receive the next step, because the gap in them does not convert into money without knowing which decisions were taken.
Rate optimization: what you gain, and what gets locked in
Price term
Coverage you choose
Monthly saving
Locked in by the term, per month
Free to leave with no penalty
Locked in by the term is the monthly amount you commit to keep on that cloud until the end of the contract. All three charge the commitment whether you use it or not: Google bills the committed resources regardless of usage, Microsoft charges the committed amount every hour and what goes unused expires without rolling over, AWS treats No Upfront as a contractual obligation for the whole term.
Free to leave with no penalty is the rest of the invoice. That part you move wherever you want, whenever you want, with no penalty.
Your next step.
Your next step.
The other four areas
Allocation, forecasting, anomalies and accountability do not convert into money from the invoice total. The gap in them shows up as a decision taken without information, and what that costs depends on which decision was taken. What can be delivered here is the next step for each one, as a concrete action.
Exit rules
Documented points that change the decision
What your cloud already gives you for free
Where the numbers come from
28% and 46%
Google's flexible commitment discount for general-purpose series, at 1 and 3 years. An exact figure, not a ceiling, and already on monthly payment.
Google Cloud, Committed use discounts for Compute Engine
11% to 65%
The official range for Azure's savings plan for compute. The 65% corresponds to an M64dsv2 Ubuntu in East US over 36 months. Microsoft does not publish a percentage by term.
Microsoft, Savings plans page, footnote 1
up to 66%
The ceiling of AWS Compute Savings Plans, the most flexible plan. AWS does not publish the 1-year percentage, only that 3 years returns more.
AWS, Savings Plans User Guide
How the calculation works
The invoice splits in two. The non-production share responds to the calendar, because it can be shut down. The production share responds to commitment, because it runs continuously and that is exactly why it is a candidate for a reservation.
Rate axis. The uncommitted base multiplied by the coverage you choose and by the vendor's percentage. The locked-in and free columns do not depend on any percentage, and they are exact across all three clouds.
Calendar axis. The hours outside the window you reported, applied to the non-production spend you reported. It is a ceiling, and probably well above the real figure, because shutting a machine down stops only the compute charge. Storage, disks, traffic, licences and managed services keep being charged, and we do not know their proportion on your invoice.
On Google the calendar axis is a range, because shutting down lowers the Sustained Use Discount. The calculation uses the official table by monthly usage band.
The answer ranges use the midpoint. The 15 to 30 range reads 22.5. The open top range uses its floor, which is the conservative treatment.
A four-level ladder adapted from the FinOps Foundation maturity model, which uses the Crawl, Walk and Run stages. Licensed under CC BY 4.0, which permits adaptation with attribution. Official AWS, Azure and Google pages consulted in September 2026.
Want the real number for your operation?
Your assessment stays on screen either way. The form below is optional and does two things: it delivers this assessment as a PDF, with your name on the cover, ready to file or forward internally, and it opens the conversation about the next step, which is reading the real invoice and inventory. Filling it in changes nothing of what you have already seen here.