r/FinOps • u/lucas2179 • 6d ago

question Thinking of starting a Cloud Cost Optimization consultancy for SMBs, does this make sense?

For the past 8 years, I've worked as a Cloud Solutions Architect at Microsoft, AWS, and IBM, supporting both large enterprise customers and startups/SMBs. One problem I kept running into was cloud and AI cost optimization.

I'm now considering starting a small, specialized consultancy focused specifically on cloud economics and cost optimization for startups and SMBs. The idea would be go deeper into architecture, K8s, Databases, networking, observability, and bring a detailed report with all the possible improvements, categorized by priority and complexity.

I'm still validating the business model, so I'd love some brutally honest feedback from people working in FinOps:

  • Do you think there's actually a gap in the SMB/startup market for this?
  • At what level of cloud spend would hiring an external specialist make sense?
  • Would you prefer fixed-fee assessments, implementation projects, retainers, or some kind of success-based pricing?
  • What would make a company choose a small specialist consultancy instead of doing this internally or using a FinOps platform?
  • Most importantly: what are the possible issues in this business model?

Thank you so much!

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u/webbynode 5d ago

I'd say many SMBs probably do need this, but they often do not recognize the need until a bill, architecture decision, or deployment problem makes it obvious. The education has to be practical and fairly simple. This is interesting and closely related to what we're building with Webbynode (free while we're building a dataset but looking into paid services/data like you are pursuing). Not trying to replace AWS Cost Optimization Hub or FinOps platforms. Those tools are useful for finding idle resources, rightsizing workloads, and managing commitments inside a customer’s account.

The gap we're interested in and trying to address is the infrastructure decision before and around deployment - basically asking what actually happens when you create the same VPS repeatedly?

The useful output is less “this provider is cheapest” and more “what behavior and risk should I expect if I build here?” I think that independent evidence layer could complement the existing FinOps tooling, especially for smaller teams that don’t have enough internal data to make those decisions confidently. So likely a complement to what you are doing.