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ProtoComet
ProtoComet

  • Make Every Cloud Investment Count.

    Gain control over cloud spending with practical cost optimization and FinOps advisory. Identify inefficiencies, improve resource utilization, and align technology costs with business value—building a sustainable approach to cloud economics without compromising performance, reliability, or growth.

Where this actually breaks

Azure overspend is rarely a pricing problem. It builds up from small decisions that made sense at the time, and nobody went back to check.

The bill arrives, but nobody can explain it

The invoice shows one total. The Azure portal splits it into hundreds of lines, grouped in ways that don’t map to a product, a customer or a team. So the monthly question “why did this go up?” gets a shrug, or a week of someone’s time.

Commitments feel too risky, so you pay full price

Reservations and savings plans can cut compute costs sharply, but they lock you into a one- or three-year term. If the business might change shape, nobody wants to sign. So workloads that haven’t changed in two years still run at the on-demand rate.

Resources were sized once and never revisited

Virtual machines and databases were set large at launch or migration, “to be safe.” Traffic settled, but the sizes didn’t. Most of that headroom is paid for every hour and never used.

The surprises come from services nobody watches

Log and monitoring data, traffic between regions, backups and snapshots that never expire. None of these is a big decision, so none gets reviewed. Together they’re often a large share of the bill.

Cost as an architecture decision: six levers, in order

The order is deliberate. First make every cost visible and owned. Then remove what isn’t needed, size what’s left, and only then commit to it. The structural changes come last, because they’re the largest and the slowest, and the earlier savings pay for them.

1. Allocate

Every resource tagged with an owner, enforced by Azure so new ones can’t skip it. Subscriptions and resource groups arranged around how the business thinks about cost: by product, customer or team. One monthly report that both the people paying the bill and the people running the systems recognize.

Output: Allocation Model

2. Clean up and schedule

Delete what nothing uses: unattached disks, idle IP addresses, snapshots and logs kept long past any need. Then make non-production environments stop when nobody is using them. Often the quickest saving in the estate, and usually blocked by one integration test that runs at three in the morning.

Output: Clean-up list and schedule policy

3. Right-size

Every server and database compared against what it actually uses over a real period, including the month-end peak. Changes are made in stages, because the large size was chosen for a reason once.

Output: Sizing evidence and plan

4. Commit

Reservations and savings plans sized to the stable base. The term and type are chosen with planned architecture changes in mind. A recommendation someone can sign, with ttrade-offs written down.

Output: Commitment recommendation

5.Re-architect

The biggest lever: virtual machines that should be App Service, three databases that should be one, a queue doing the job of a cluster. Found by reading the estate, not the invoice.

Output: Structural recommendations

3.Govern

Every month: what changed against plan, new resources without owners, commitments coming up for renewal, unusual spikes. Every quarter: a summary for whoever signs the invoice.

Output: Monthly cost review

How the work actually runs

Fixed price for the review, a monthly fee for the cadence. Never a share of the savings, because a fee tied to reductions is an incentive to recommend the largest change rather than the right one, and because the largest lever is architecture, which is your engineers' work

Cost review, fixed price


Before the first wave, you get the decision register and the wave plan, built on your own discovery data and delivered in 2-4 weeks. This is often where a move-everything-as-is plan picks up retirements and modernization, and ends up with a smaller monthly bill. You can stop here and keep the plan.

Monthly review, or hand it over


After the review, you choose. We can run a monthly cost review: what changed and why, new resources without an owner, commitments coming up for renewal, and unusual spikes. Or your team takes over, with the review template and the checks it runs, so the savings hold without an ongoing fee.

What senior-only means here


The person reading your invoice is the same person reading your architecture. That’s the only way the biggest savings get found. A review done from billing data alone produces a list of reservations to buy. This one explains why your estate costs what it does, and what would change that.


What you walk away with

A cost model that finance and engineering both recognize, and a plan whose items each have an effort, a risk and an owner

➖ Ownership model.How cost maps to products, teams or customers, the tagging policy that enforces it, and the showback report built on it.


➖ Clean-up and schedule list. Every unused resource to delete, and which non-production environments switch off when. It also lists the overnight jobs that had to be worked around.


➖ Structural recommendations. The architecture changes that would lower your running cost for good. Each comes with the engineering effort it takes and a plain explanation of where the saving comes from, not just a percentage.

➖ Right-sizing plan. Every oversized server and database, with what it actually uses, the size it should be, and a safe order for making the changes.


➖ Commitment recommendation. Which reservations and savings plans to buy, for how long, and how much they cover. The risk of over-committing is written down for whoever signs.


➖ A review that keeps the savings. A periodic check of what changed, new resources without an owner, commitments coming up for renewal and unusual spikes, plus a one-page quarterly summary for whoever signs the invoice.

Our Way

Discounts make an expensive estate a little cheaper. The lasting savings come from how the estate was built, so that is where this work looks first. It starts by giving every cost an owner, because a cost nobody owns never goes down.


Engineers get evidence, not targets. Nobody should have to guess on a downsize and carry the risk alone, so every change comes with the data that makes it safe and a way back if it is not.

And sometimes the right answer is to leave it. A saving is not always worth the risk, and because ProtoComet takes no share of the savings, it can afford to tell you so.

Nobody has ever been blamed for an oversized database. That is the whole cost problem, and no tool fixes it. Ownership does.


Yogesh, founder and principal consultant

Questions clients typically ask

Answered directly. If the honest answer is "it depends", the dependency is named.
It depends on how the estate was built, and any number given before seeing it would be a guess. The first conversation usually gives a rough sense of where the money is going. The review gives an actual figure for each change, with where the saving comes from, so you can check it against your next invoice.
If it isn’t, you’ll hear that in the first conversation, before any fee. For a small estate, the review can be scaled down to a short assessment with a list of fixes your own team can make.
Use them. They’re good, and the review starts from their data. But they look at one resource at a time. They can’t tell you which costs belong to which product, whether a three-year commitment fits your plans, or that three databases should be one. That needs someone reading the architecture, not just the bill.

No. A percentage rewards the biggest recommendation rather than the right one, and makes “leave it alone” an answer the advisor can’t afford to give. The review is a fixed price. If it finds little to save, it says so and costs the same.

They’re right to. Every change comes with what the resource actually uses, including at month-end, plus a way to roll back. Changes go in one at a time, lowest risk first. Some resources genuinely can’t be reduced. The evidence shows which ones, and they’re left alone with the reason written down.

Read-only access to cost data, subscriptions and monitoring. Nothing in your estate is changed during the review. If ProtoComet later makes changes for you, that access is agreed separately and scoped to the work.

Ready to move?

Let's talk about where you are and where you want to go.  and whether modernization is even the right answer this year. If it is not, you will hear that.

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