Fractional Platform Engineering · Architecture · Security · Cost
Stopoverpaying for AWS
I’m Waqaar, a Brisbane platform engineer. Most clients start with the bill, but the work covers the lot — infrastructure reviews, system design, security, and the engineering practices that keep a platform healthy.
Sound familiar?
You built the product. Nobody ever really built the infrastructure. It just grew.
Book a callThe bill keeps climbing
Nobody owns cost. Instances run all night for no reason, nothing's on a savings plan, and every month the invoice is a little worse than the last one.
Deploys are scary
Releases happen by hand, after hours, with everyone holding their breath. There's no rollback plan. One person knows how it all fits together, and they'd like a holiday.
Security is a hope
Half the team has admin keys and nothing is monitored. Your first enterprise security questionnaire is going to be a very long week.
Too small to hire
A full-time platform engineer costs $180k+ once you load it up. Most startups don't need 40 hours a week. They need the right ten.
How it works
Look first, then fix. Everything ends up in your repos.
01Free cost review
A 30-minute call and a read-only look at your AWS account. No commitment.
02Findings & plan
A prioritised savings report and a fixed quote. Yours to keep either way.
03I do the work
Embedded in your Slack, changes shipped as code, documented as I go.
04Stay on top of it
If you want, I stay on a small retainer so the bill never creeps back up.
Try the numbers
What could a cost audit save you?
Drag in your rough monthly AWS spend. The estimate uses the 20–30% range I typically find — your real figure comes out of the free review.
Your monthly AWS spend
An estimate, not a quote. It assumes an account with the usual suspects — always-on instances, no savings plans, forgotten storage. Yours will have its own surprises.
Around $43,200–$64,800 a year — and a $2,500 audit that pays for itself in about 2 weeks.
What I do
The work, plainly.
Fixed scope or a monthly retainer, priced up front. Most people start with the cost audit, because it tends to pay for itself. These are the six most people come for.
All fifteen services →AWS Cost Audit & Optimisation
I go through your account line by line, put a dollar figure on every piece of waste, and fix the safe ones on the spot.
FinOps Practice
The follow-on from an audit: tagging, budgets, alerts and a monthly review so the bill never quietly creeps back up.
Platform Foundations
Terraform, proper pipelines, monitoring. The groundwork you keep meaning to do.
SecOps
Least-privilege IAM, secrets out of environment variables, alerts that actually reach a human. Done before it becomes a headline.
ISO 27001 & ISMS
I've taken a company from nothing to a passed ISO 27001 audit. I can do the same for yours without burying your team in paperwork.
Fractional Platform Engineer
Ten-ish senior hours a week across cost, infrastructure and security. In your Slack, not behind a ticket queue.
Everything below.
One person.
This is the stack I've run on my own for years. You get all of it without running a hiring round.
Track record
Work I'm happy to be judged on.
From my years as a sole platform engineer. Names withheld, numbers real, references available if you want to check.
Cutting a SaaS company's cloud bill
Right-sizing, waste removal and some architectural surgery. A 27% annual reduction, with zero downtime along the way.
Read the story → ISO 27001Zero to certified ISMS
A compliance program built from scratch, through to certification. Controls, pen-test program, the lot.
Read the story → SaaS GovernanceTaming 60+ SaaS subscriptions
Someone finally read every invoice. Duplicate tools cancelled, unused seats gone, offboarding gaps closed.
Read the story →Names withheld for the usual professional reasons. The numbers are real.
Notes from the field
Things I keep telling people.
Short, practical reads on cloud cost, security and compliance. No fluff, no gatekeeping.
The five lines on your AWS bill that are usually wrong
After years of reading other people's invoices, the same five culprits show up almost every time. Check yours against the list.
Read → Cost · 3 minWhy I do savings plans last
Committing to a bad architecture just makes the waste cheaper. The order of operations matters more than the discount.
Read → Compliance · 5 minISO 27001 for a fifteen-person startup
You don't need a compliance team, a GRC platform, or a thousand pages of policy. Here's what you actually need.
Read →Stop overpaying forAWS
A free half-hour look at your account. Worst case, you learn where the money’s going.
Book a free review