Rate Optimization
Commitment planning for Savings Plans, Reserved Instances and committed use discounts sized to real usage, plus review of support fees, enterprise agreements and Marketplace spend.
Rate Optimization is the CloudIQ solution for spend that is correct in volume but priced worse than it could be. It covers the cloud providers' commitment instruments and the commercial layer around them: support fees, enterprise agreements and Marketplace subscriptions, which few cost tools analyze.
Commitments#
| Instrument | What the checks find | What we deliver |
|---|---|---|
| AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances | Coverage gaps, low utilization, expiring commitments and stacked expiry cliffs, effective savings rate, the wrong instrument for the workload | A purchase plan staggered over time, and a 0 to 100 score for how hard each commitment would be to exit |
| Google Cloud CUDs, SUDs and Spot | Gaps in committed-use, sustained-use and Spot coverage, plus price changes and their financial impact | A one-year and three-year purchase plan |
| BigQuery commitments | Whether commitments match usage, and whether on-demand or Editions is the better fit for each project | Projected savings for pay-as-you-go, one-year and three-year options, with a break-even point per project. See Data Cloud Optimization |
Advisory by design. CloudIQ models the purchase from your measured baseline and shows the break-even. It never purchases a commitment on your behalf.
The commercial layer#
| Area | What the checks find |
|---|---|
| Support plan | Your support fee priced against every support tier, downgrade candidates, and fee anomalies. A downgrade is never recommended on price alone |
| AWS enterprise agreements | Commitment pacing against your contract, projected year-end position, credits expiring unused, invoice reconciliation variance |
| AWS Marketplace | Subscription inventory and billing calendar, renewal windows, unreviewed auto-renewals, private offer candidates, duplicate products across accounts, idle subscriptions, spend eligible for commitment |
How it fits with usage optimization#
Rate and usage interact. A rightsizing change reduces the usage a commitment was sized for, and a commitment bought before cleanup locks in waste. CloudIQ ranks both in the same queue and prices each saving after your existing coverage. A resize estimate already allows for the Savings Plan that covers the instance.
Evidence used#
Cost Explorer and billing export data, commitment inventories and utilization from the provider APIs, your contract commitments where you supply them, and the usage baselines from the other solutions.
Next#
- Cloud Cost Optimization
- Data Cloud Optimization: BigQuery pricing model fit
- Frequently asked questions
Try this against your own spend
A free savings analysis runs the checks described in these docs against your AWS or Google Cloud account and returns a ranked list of priced findings.