⌁ Azure cost optimization
What would your team do with the money your Azure bill wastes?
Most Azure bills quietly carry 10–40% waste — and finding it is no quick glance at a dashboard. Certified Azure specialists go deep into your architecture while business & process consultants assess how the environment is actually used — looking, not touching, view-only. Then we cut what you approve, without touching reliability. Our share — three months of the savings — comes out of the savings. You never pay more than you do today.
Your Azure bill never goes up. It only goes down — and stays down.
Our share equals three months of the savings we prove on your Azure invoice — invoiced in three monthly parts, after the savings are live on your bill. During those three months your total spend simply stays at today's level. From month four, the full reduction is yours — to keep, or to re-invest in Azure where it now demonstrably pays.
What would this look like for you?
Three quick inputs — we’ll model a 24-month scenario for your Azure estate, from €1k to €1M+ monthly spend.
The report is generated for your inputs (€22,000/month on Azure) with the full scenario table. Email is all we need — the rest helps us follow up properly, and is optional.
Generated for your inputs — all three savings scenarios for your estate, modeled over 24 months:
- Nothing is agreed from this table alone — savings are verified on your real Azure invoice first, and the check itself is free and view-only.
Indicative ranges from estates we’ve analyzed — your real number comes from the free savings check, against a starting number your finance team signs off. Our share is spread over three months, paid from realized savings, and capped by agreement for large estates. Examples in EUR — we also work in NOK, SEK, DKK, GBP, CHF, USD and more.
Flip the question
A 30% Azure cut is a budget increase nobody had to approve.
The money is already in your budget — it's just going to Microsoft for capacity you don't use. Using your scenario above, here's what €18,000/month of recovered Azure spend buys instead:
2–3 hires
the engineers you couldn't fund
put the recovered run-rate toward people instead of waste.
€216k/yr
the AI experimentation budget
fund the workloads you actually want to grow.
100% margin
straight to the bottom line — after our share
every year, indefinitely — no headcount, no project risk.
Adjust the scenario above and these update with it. Examples in EUR — we work in your currency.
How it works
We look. You decide.
We fix. Your invoice proves it.
No access to your apps or business data — view-only sight of your cost and usage figures, plus a guided look at how your environment is put together. That's how we find the real bottlenecks behind the bill, not just the obvious line items — and how we cut cost without touching reliability. Nothing in production changes without your written go-ahead, a test plan, and a way back.
Step 1 / The look
We look — we don't touch
View-only access to your cost and usage data (or an export your team runs) — plus a working session on your setup, workloads and constraints. Specialists who know how Azure pricing and architecture actually behave map where the money goes, where it leaks, and where the real bottlenecks sit. ~5 days for smaller estates, 2–4 weeks for enterprise scopes.
Step 2 / The number
Agree the starting number
Your average Azure cost over recent months becomes the reference point — signed off by your finance team, with credits, taxes, one-offs and your own growth separated out first.
Step 3 / The list
Your savings list, ranked by risk
Every saving, ranked: billing-only wins that touch nothing, easy cleanup, then tuning. Each with its value, owner, and how it gets verified.
Step 4 / The fix
We fix what you approve
Only the actions you green-light get implemented — staged, monitored, reversible. Savings are counted on your real Azure invoice over a full billing cycle before our share exists at all.
The honest objection
"Couldn't our own team just do this?"
Quite possibly — and the work your team has already done counts; it usually catches the obvious. The rest is a different kind of job: it takes several specialisms working as one — pricing mechanics, architecture, governance, process — with the focus and the mandate to carry every change through to the invoice. That's what we bring: a coordinated specialist team that owns the result end-to-end, from finding the waste to proving the drop. The difference in practice:
01
Undivided focus
Your engineers are paid to ship product — cost work is the first thing every sprint drops, in every company. For us it's the only thing on the board, until it's done.
02
Pattern recognition
We optimize Azure estates back to back — pricing mechanics, architecture trade-offs, governance. We find waste fast because we've watched it hide in the same places across hundreds of workloads.
03
Incentives no org chart can copy
Internal cleanups stall because nobody owns the saving. We're paid only from verified results — if your bill doesn't drop, we earn nothing. That alignment is the product.
While the engagement runs, we take charge of cost end-to-end — one accountable team, with your people at every approval gate. When our share is settled, the playbook, the tooling and the habits stay with your organization. We make your people look good, not redundant.
The fine print, upfront
How we count savings — in the contract, not in the footnotes.
This is the part most vendors keep vague. We put it in writing so your finance team can audit every euro — and so a disagreement has a defined path before it ever becomes a dispute.
The full counting rules (incl. growth normalization and the dispute path) ship with every proposal.
1
The starting number
Your average monthly Azure run-rate over an agreed period (3–6 months), reviewed and signed off jointly.
2
What doesn't count
Taxes, credits, support charges, currency swings, one-offs, new workloads you add, things you switch off yourself — all separated out, in writing.
3
What does count
The verified drop against the starting number, visible on your official Azure invoice over at least one full billing cycle.
4
When we get paid
Three months of verified savings, invoiced in three monthly parts after the evidence is accepted. Capped by agreement for large estates — never open-ended.
Cost spikes are a symptom. We also fix the causes.
Most Azure waste comes back unless the practices around it change. Where the savings check uncovers structural causes, we can fix those too — priced transparently: lighter work as additional months of the savings; bigger programs as standard time & materials consulting. Never bundled in silently.
From a €1k Azure bill to a €1M estate — the deal scales, the terms adapt.
Pilot engagement
€64,000 a month on Azure, down to €13,000 — while traffic grew 5×.
A European manufacturing & logistics enterprise running an Azure-hosted logistics platform: ML models, real-time data streaming, global availability requirements.
Monthly Azure spend
Jan 2023 – Jun 2025
2023
2024
2025
−80%
monthly Azure spend
5×
traffic growth handled
What was done
Deep audit of compute & storage / resources matched to actual demand / pricing matched to how workloads actually run / proactive alerts & automated guardrails / staged rollout, approval at every step.
Starting-number method, scope, timeline and before/after invoice evidence shared in detail under NDA. Named references available as our client list grows — ask us.
Keep it optimized. Keep it governed.
Azure spend drifts — new workloads appear, teams over-provision, anomalies go unnoticed. Optional monitoring keeps your cost posture aligned. No plan is ever required to keep your savings.
FAQ
Fair questions, straight answers.
How does your share not hurt our cash flow?
Our share equals three months of verified savings, invoiced in three monthly parts after the savings are live on your Azure invoice. During those three months your total outflow equals what you were already paying. From month four, the full reduction is yours — indefinitely.
What savings should we realistically expect?
It depends on who watches the bill today. Estates where nobody owns cost often have 20–40% addressable; occasional reviews 12–30%; active FinOps teams 6–18%, mostly in rate optimization. We won't promise a blanket number — the free savings check establishes yours, and we only proceed if it clears a threshold we agree together.
How long from first contact to seeing savings — and when does your share start?
The free savings check takes about 5 business days for smaller estates, 2–4 weeks for enterprise. Once you approve the fixes, most are implemented within 1–4 weeks — tested, staged and reversible. The savings then show on your next full Azure billing cycle, so a typical estate sees real, verified results within roughly 4–8 weeks of starting. Our share only begins once those savings appear on your actual invoice, then runs over three months — never before, and never if nothing is found.
How much of our team's time does this take?
Very little. The savings check needs about 15 minutes to grant view-only access, plus one ~45-minute session on how your environment is actually used. After that you review a ranked list and approve what proceeds — an hour or two of decisions, not weeks of work. We implement the approved fixes; your team approves each gate and inherits the playbook afterwards. Most clients spend under half a day of total effort across the whole engagement.
What access do you need?
For the savings check: view-only sight of your Azure cost and usage data — Cost Management Reader, Advisor, Resource Graph, or an export your team runs. Never your business data or application databases. For multi-tenant setups we support Azure Lighthouse delegated access. Implementation access is scoped later, with your security team.
What happens after the engagement?
Once our share is settled, 100% of all future savings belong to your organization — no revenue share, no lock-in. Optional care plans are scoped and quoted with your engagement summary; neither is required to keep your savings.
What if you don't find enough to be worth it?
Then we tell you, and you owe nothing. The savings check is free and carries no obligation. If the addressable waste doesn't clear the threshold we set together, we say so plainly and walk away — we'd rather pass than sell you an engagement that won't pay for itself.
Will this disrupt our running workloads?
No. Every change is scoped, staged and reviewed with your engineers before it ships — nothing moves without sign-off. We work to your change windows and rollback plans, and the optimizations we make are designed to be invisible to your users and your uptime.
How is the verified saving actually measured?
Against your own Azure invoice, not our estimates. We baseline your spend before we start, then measure the reduction that shows up on the real bill once changes are live. You see the same numbers we do — our share is calculated from what your invoice confirms, not from a projection.
Are we locked into a long contract?
No lock-in. Once the three-part share is settled, the relationship is done unless you want a care plan — and that's optional, scoped and quoted separately. There's no retainer, no auto-renewal and no revenue share on the savings you keep going forward.
Who's behind Valor
Specialists across security, cloud and software — anchored by certified Azure expertise.
You get one accountable account manager, working directly with the implementation specialists who coordinate each piece of work to the right people. On most non-enterprise engagements, the specialists you meet are the ones doing the work.
AZ
Certified Azure specialists
Cost, architecture & FinOps
The core of every savings check — deep Azure cost, architecture and FinOps work, verified against your real invoice.
SE
Security, cloud & software engineers
Cyber security · cloud platforms & computing · software engineering
The bench behind the fixes — hardening, automation and platform work, coordinated by implementation specialists.
✓ Microsoft Azure certified
✓ NDA & DPA ready
✓ GDPR-compliant process
✓ Independent consultancy
✓ Fully insured
Named client references available under NDA on request.
Find out what your Azure bill should be.
Tell us a little about your environment and we'll reply within one business day with next steps — including exactly what view-only access the free savings check needs. Whatever you decide afterwards, the findings are yours.
Pick a time that suits you.
A 30-minute call with an architect — Mon–Fri, 10:00–14:00 CET. Choose a slot and we confirm within one business day.
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Pick any business day (Mon–Fri) and a time that suits you — in your own time zone. We confirm by email.
We have pencilled in . The confirmation email with your details and next steps is on its way to your inbox, and we will confirm this time by email within one business day. If it stops working for you, just reply and we will find another.
Optional — a recent cost export lets us come to the call prepared.