Cloud & AI — cost + abuse control
LLM APIs and cloud resources are metered, uncapped, and fail open — to your wallet. One leaked key, one runaway agent loop, or one viral moment can 10× the bill overnight — and an AI feature can be jailbroken, or drained as someone else's free tool. I put hard caps and guardrails on your AI and cloud spend so it fails closed: success can't bankrupt you, and nobody can turn your AI against you. And I tell you, honestly, what to leave alone.
No signup. No sales call. A real engineer — me, not a chatbot or a sales team — reads what you send and replies within a business day.
Same job, two surfaces. Cloud cost is where this started — it's the proven, productized side you'll see below. AI is where the meter is now most dangerous: faster, and abusable on top of overspent. I do both, because they're one problem — a meter with no ceiling.
The figures above are AWS, but this isn't an AWS problem: Azure (~$0.087/GB) and Google Cloud (~$0.12/GB) price egress in the same band — they move together because it's a moat, not a cost. Sources are cited in your assessment. The pattern is always the same: the savings grow as you grow, because a server you rent flat doesn't charge you per gigabyte.
To be clear, "leaving" doesn't mean leaving datacenters. You move to the same tier-3 datacenters the big providers use — rented at a flat monthly rate (OVH, Hetzner) or hardware you own. What you leave behind is the per-gigabyte meter and the lock-in, not the reliability.
Every cost tool on the market sells you visibility — a dashboard that tells you, in a lovely chart, that you're bleeding. None of them stop the bleeding: they don't shut down the idle box, enforce the tags, carry out the migration, or cap a runaway process. Visibility isn't remediation — the bill only drops when someone with the time and the authority executes the change. That's what I am: not a report, an outcome. I find the leak, do the fix, and keep it boring month after month.
And it's the same job on a second, hotter surface now — AI spend. An LLM API is a meter with no ceiling, plus a failure mode cloud never had: abuse. A leaked key or a runaway agent loop can 10× the bill overnight, and the only control that catches it in time lives on the request path, not the invoice. Cloud or AI, it's one problem — a meter with no ceiling — and I put the ceiling back. See the playbook I'm building in the open →
An LLM API is metered per token, uncapped by default, and fails open — to your wallet. Worse than cloud in three ways: the meter runs faster, the endpoint is built to accept anything from strangers, and your AI can be turned against you. Here's what fail-closed looks like for AI.
Every 'surprise AWS bill' story shares one root cause nobody names: the account has no ceiling. Unlimited postpaid billing is the default, it fails open — to your wallet — and it scales from a student's $1,100 to a funded startup's six-figure weekend. Why the default is reckless, and the fail-closed alternative.
A surprise AWS bill — a resource left running, or a leaked key someone abused — is one of the most common panics in cloud. Here's how to ask AWS to waive a first-time accidental bill (it works more often than you'd think), and the six guardrails that stop it happening again.
Most "cut your cloud costs" help is a one-time report. But the meter never stops, and a bill you fix once drifts right back up: traffic grows, someone ships a feature that re-introduces egress, a reserved commitment lapses, a new managed service quietly turns on. So the honest product isn't a document — it's an ongoing job.
Managed Cloud-Exit is that job, done for you. I move the parts of your stack that bleed off the hyperscaler, run them, and keep optimizing the bill every month — and each month you get a plain report of exactly what I saved you against your starting bill.
You always keep the other 80% of what I save you, and the base is a fraction of the platform engineer you'd otherwise hire. I earn more only when your bill gets smaller — never when you use more. See the full plan, the math, and the on-ramp →
You don't start here, and you don't pay to find out if it's worth it — start with the free look below.
On the AI side, the work is newer and scoped to your setup rather than a fixed plan: the gateway, the hard caps and per-user quotas, the abuse guardrails, and the keys locked down. Same starting point — the free look — and I tell you exactly where you're fail-open before anyone commits to anything. (I'm building this playbook in the open, one lesson at a time: the series →.)
Most "leave the cloud" pitches sell you a migration no matter what. I don't. If your bill is spiky, mostly idle, or dominated by managed services rather than traffic, moving it can cost more once you count the engineering time. The assessment exists to find that out before you spend a cent on a migration — and I won't put you on a managed plan that doesn't save you more than it costs.
Honest math beats a bigger invoice. "Zero ongoing cost" is a myth — someone always runs the servers. That's the job I'm pricing. The savings share is measured against your starting bill, dated and sourced in your monthly report, so you can always see you're ahead. Often you are. Sometimes you wouldn't be, and I'll say so.
Two fair fears, answered straight — because the honest answer is what makes the savings believable.
The fastest way to know if this is worth your time. Forward a recent cloud invoice or Cost Explorer export — or just describe your AI setup (which models, where the keys live, what's capped) — and I send back a one-page read: where the meter can run away, where you're fail-open or abusable, and the highest-leverage fix. On the cloud side that includes your likely flat-rate cost with the egress line broken out. No obligation, no sales call.
Every message comes straight to me — I read and reply to each one myself, usually within a day, and what readers send shapes what I build next. It's just me for now, so that's genuinely true; it won't be forever.
Prefer email? Send it straight to ami@smallestbusiness.com. Read by me, never shared.
The person who reads your bill is the same person who designs the migration, carries it out, and runs the servers afterwards — month after month. No account managers, no handoffs, no junior doing the work a brochure promised a senior would. I'm not a reseller and not an affiliate — I make money when your infrastructure gets cheaper and stays boring, not when you buy more of something. The base keeps the lights on; the savings share means my upside only grows when yours does.
And I don't just advise — I build. Most people who cut cloud bills are cost analysts: they hand you a report, and you still need an engineer to do the move. I've spent more than 20 years building the software itself — databases, web backends, and the security-sensitive parts like logins, key management, and rate limiting — so I can plan the migration and carry it out, including your database, the part most teams are afraid to touch. That same base — caps, auth, key handling, fail-closed systems — is exactly what putting a ceiling and guardrails on an AI feature takes, which is why the AI work is an extension of what I already do, not a pivot away from it.
One engineer raises a fair question — what happens if I'm unavailable? I answer it head-on: everything I build is standard open-source you (or anyone) can run, fully documented, and yours — no lock-in to me, and the managed plan is cancel-anytime. Here's how I handle that, why one person is an advantage, and where I'm honest about the big dependencies (including Cloudflare) →