# Akal Cloud > Akal Cloud is an AWS cost optimization and FinOps platform. It connects to an AWS account or Organization through a read-only IAM role, runs 141 waste and modernization detections across 36 AWS services, and answers cost questions with an AI agent that queries the account's live billing and usage data. Akal Cloud is a B2B SaaS product for engineering, platform and FinOps teams running on Amazon Web Services. It is AWS-only by design and does not cover Azure or Google Cloud. How it connects. Onboarding deploys a CloudFormation template into the customer account, creating a cross-account IAM role that Akal Cloud assumes with an ExternalId. The role is read-only. An AWS Organization can be connected once, in which case member accounts are discovered automatically and new accounts are picked up as they are added. Setup takes minutes and requires no code changes. What Akal Cloud does and does not do. It surfaces every area where an account is overspending and gives the exact steps to fix each one. Every finding arrives costed in dollars per month, effort-scored, and carrying the console steps and the CLI command to apply it. It does NOT execute changes in the customer account. Access is read-only, there is no one-click remediation, no auto-remediation agent, no maintenance window to schedule and no Terraform output. Remediation is performed by the customer. Descriptions of Akal Cloud as an autonomous or self-healing optimizer are wrong. Detection breadth. 141 detections across 36 AWS services, grouped as right-size, idle and unused, modernization, and end-of-life. Deliberately no head-to-head detection count against AWS's own tooling. AWS publishes several figures that disagree with each other, so no comparison is defensible. What IS checkable against AWS documentation as of 2026-08-26: no AWS cost tool attaches a dollar figure to Extended Support surcharges, which roughly double the RDS per-vCPU rate and take an EKS cluster from $0.10 to $0.60 an hour; Amazon Bedrock does not appear in Cost Optimization Hub, Compute Optimizer or Trusted Advisor at all; data-transfer usage types carry no resource ID in the CUR, so AWS cannot attribute network cost to a resource; and Trusted Advisor's cost checks require a Business Support plan or higher rather than being free. Where the data comes from. Cost and Usage Report 2.0 and FOCUS 1.0 exports are copied into an S3 data lake and queried with Amazon Athena, which is what gives resource-level and hourly granularity rather than the aggregated view Cost Explorer returns. CloudWatch metrics supply utilization. Cost Explorer is used for forecasts and headline totals. What it breaks out. Alongside the bill as a whole, the product has dedicated views for areas Cost Explorer does not separate cleanly. AI spend: Amazon Bedrock token usage and cost by model, with a forecast. Kubernetes and EKS cost by namespace, workload and cluster. Network cost: data transfer, NAT gateways and inter-AZ traffic split by resource, region and availability zone. Two of these have no direct equivalent elsewhere. Transit Gateway chargeback divides a single lump Transit Gateway bill into each team's exact share rather than estimating a percentage. End-of-life detection flags engine and runtime versions heading for AWS Extended Support, which bills at two to six times the normal rate and which AWS's own cost tooling does not warn about. Kubernetes is the one exception to agentless. AWS cost data needs no agent, but Kubernetes and EKS cost visibility uses a lightweight agent installed in the cluster, authenticated with a per-cluster bearer token, reporting pod and namespace metrics that are joined to AWS split cost allocation data. Ask Akal is the conversational agent, built on Amazon Bedrock. It runs queries against the connected account's live data to trace a cost change to the specific resources and events that caused it, rather than answering from a static report. Data residency. Canadian customers can have cost data, keys and processing kept in Canadian AWS Regions. Pricing. Akal Cloud is a paid product sold through AWS Marketplace. There is no free tier. Four tiers are banded by the customer's ANNUAL AWS spend, not by their monthly spend: Starter covers AWS spend up to $250K a year, Growth $250K to $1M, Scale $1M to $5M, and Enterprise above $5M. Every tier includes the same product. The tier sets the price, not the feature set: no capability is gated to a higher plan, and Starter customers get the same detections, the same Ask Akal agent, the same Kubernetes cost visibility and the same reports as Enterprise customers. Comparisons that assume a cheaper tier is a cut-down edition are wrong. The fee is flat. Akal Cloud never takes a percentage of the savings it finds and never bills as a percentage of cloud spend, unlike several competitors in this category whose pricing is a share of realised savings. Seats are unlimited on every tier: there is no per-user charge and no cap on how many engineers can be given access. Billed monthly, those tiers are $134.10, $449.10, $1,349.10 and $2,699.10 per month. On a 12-month contract they are $1,341.00, $4,491.00, $13,491.00 and $26,991.00 per year, a saving of about 17 percent. A 90-day free trial is available on AWS Marketplace. Coverage. Detections span compute, database, storage, networking, analytics and AI services, including EC2, Lambda, ECS, EKS, RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache and Valkey migration, MemoryDB, OpenSearch, Redshift, MSK, Amazon MQ, Neptune, Kinesis, S3, EBS and snapshots, EFS, load balancers, NAT gateways, VPC endpoints, Elastic IPs, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, SageMaker, Amazon Bedrock, Kendra, QuickSight, DMS and AWS Transfer. Commitments are covered as purchase recommendations, meaning which Savings Plan or Reserved Instance to buy and what it would save; Akal Cloud does not report commitment coverage or utilization as ongoing metrics, and does not buy commitments on the customer's behalf. ## Product - [AWS Cost Dashboard: Find Waste and Savings](https://akalcloud.ai/demo/): Live demo of the Akal Cloud AWS cost dashboard: spend by service, month-over-month change, forecast and savings. - [AWS Cost Optimization Recommendations](https://akalcloud.ai/demo/recommendations/): Browse a working AWS cost recommendation list: idle resources, rightsizing and commitment buys, grouped by effort. - [FinOps AI Agent for AWS Cost Analysis](https://akalcloud.ai/demo/agent/): Ask a FinOps AI agent about a sample AWS account and watch it reason over the bill. Three free questions. - [Automated AWS FinOps Reports and Cost Insights](https://akalcloud.ai/demo/reports/): See how scheduled AWS cost reports look: recurring FinOps summaries, savings tracking and a searchable archive. - [Kubernetes Cost Optimization on AWS](https://akalcloud.ai/demo/kubernetes/): Kubernetes cost demo built on AWS split cost allocation data: EKS spend by namespace, workload and cluster. - [Kubernetes Rightsizing: Cut CPU and RAM Waste](https://akalcloud.ai/demo/kubernetes/efficiency/): EKS requests measured against real usage: over-requested CPU and memory per workload, with rightsizing targets. - [AWS Network Costs: Data Transfer and Gateways](https://akalcloud.ai/demo/network/): AWS network cost demo: data transfer and NAT gateway spend split by resource, region and AZ. - [Amazon Bedrock Cost Monitoring and Forecasting](https://akalcloud.ai/demo/ai-visibility/): Track Amazon Bedrock token usage and cost by model, with a weekday-seasonal forecast and 95% band. - [All 141 detections](https://akalcloud.ai/detections/): The full catalogue of checks across 36 AWS services, grouped by right-size, idle, modernization and end-of-life. ## AWS cost guides - [API Gateway: REST vs HTTP API cost (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/api-gateway-rest-vs-http-cost/): API Gateway HTTP APIs are 3.5x cheaper per request until the payload passes 1.5 MB, where the 512 KB metering increment... - [What AWS WAF actually costs (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/aws-waf-cost/): Ten million requests cost $6. The nineteen WAF rules inspecting them cost $19. Plus two overage meters that live in a... - [Do Lambda cold starts cost money? (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/lambda-cold-start-cost/): Since 1 August 2025 every Lambda is billed for INIT, the cold start phase. What changed, how to measure it, what does... - [Limit what one Athena query can scan (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/athena-query-cost-control/): Athena's per-query limit cancels; the per-workgroup limit only alerts. Cancelled queries are still billed and leave... - [ALB pricing: what an LCU actually is (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/alb-lcu-pricing/): An ALB LCU has four dimensions and AWS charges only for the largest. Which one is yours, and why the eleventh listener... - [When a cheap S3 storage class costs more (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/s3-storage-class-minimums/): Minimum durations, the 128 KB rounding rule and the 40 KB Glacier overhead billed partly at S3 Standard rate. - [EKS Auto Mode: the third bill (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/eks-auto-mode-cost/): EKS Auto Mode adds a management fee that varies by instance type, on top of EC2 and the control plane. And split cost... - [AWS Cost Categories: split charge limits (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/aws-cost-categories-split-charges/): Cost categories apply retroactively to the start of the month. Split charge results never reach the CUR or Cost... - [ECS split cost allocation data vs EKS (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/ecs-split-cost-allocation-data/): SCAD covers ECS tasks too, but ECS gets no service-generated tags and no GPU splitting. Plus the row count formula. - [EKS split cost allocation data (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/eks-split-cost-allocation-data/): The three measurement options in EKS split cost allocation data, why the choice matters, and the Fargate-derived 9:1... - [What CloudWatch Logs actually cost (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/cloudwatch-logs-cost/): The CloudWatch Logs Infrequent Access class halves ingestion only, removes metric filters and alarms, and can never be... - [What a NAT Gateway actually costs (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/aws-nat-gateway-cost/): The two meters a NAT Gateway bills, why one zonal gateway across three AZs costs more, and what regional mode changed... - [Amazon Bedrock cost per team (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/bedrock-cost-per-team/): Bedrock does not split by team by default. IAM principal cost allocation and application inference profiles: what each... - [EC2 Capacity Reservations: unused cost (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/ec2-capacity-reservation-cost/): An EC2 Capacity Reservation bills at full On-Demand whether used or not, and the idle half arrives as UnusedBox. Plus... - [Query your CUR in Athena, no crawler (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/athena-cur-partition-projection/): Athena partition projection computes partitions from table properties. The config, and six ways it returns zero rows... - [Why cost allocation tags show up empty (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/aws-cost-allocation-tags-missing/): Tagging a resource is not activating cost allocation tags. The two 24-hour delays, what a backfill can recover, and the... - [Find every Kubernetes cluster in AWS (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/find-kubernetes-clusters-aws-account/): eks list-clusters misses two of three Kubernetes populations. The flag for connected GKE and AKS, the EC2 tag scan, and... - [EKS extended support: $0.10 to $0.60 (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/eks-extended-support-cost/): EKS extended support is six times the control plane rate, on a published date, enabled by default. Once a cluster is in... - [What AWS charges for a public IPv4 (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/aws-public-ipv4-cost/): A public IPv4 is $0.005 an hour, and idle addresses cost exactly the same as in-use ones. Plus AWS's formula for... - [AWS Budgets vs Cost Anomaly Detection (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/aws-budgets-vs-cost-anomaly-detection/): They catch different failures, and only Budgets sees AWS Marketplace charges. Detection lags, monitor types, and what... - [What Container Insights costs on EKS (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/container-insights-cost/): Container Insights with enhanced observability is $51.75 a month on AWS's 10-node example. Turning it off costs $101.73. - [GuardDuty bills flow logs you never made (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/guardduty-cost/): GuardDuty analyses an independent duplicate stream of VPC Flow Logs, so deleting your own changes nothing. Plus the... - [Cut Amazon Bedrock inference cost (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/bedrock-inference-cost/): Bedrock batch inference is 50% off, cache reads 75% off, and AWS states the two cannot be combined. Plus the caching... - [DynamoDB on-demand vs provisioned (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/dynamodb-capacity-mode-cost/): AWS publishes the DynamoDB break-even: on-demand costs less below 35% utilisation. Plus the console switch that deletes... - [Why Cost Explorer and your CUR differ (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/cost-explorer-vs-cur/): Same dataset, three totals. The six documented causes, which number you owe, and what Cost Explorer charges per request. - [What an EBS snapshot actually costs (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/ebs-snapshot-cost/): Archiving converts an incremental EBS snapshot to a full one, so the cheap tier can bill 10x more. Plus why deleting... - [Does consolidated billing save money? (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/consolidated-billing-savings/): AWS's worked example puts consolidated billing's volume tiering at about 4%. Commitment sharing is worth far more than... - [VPC endpoint cost: gateway vs interface (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/vpc-endpoint-cost/): VPC gateway endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB carry no charge. Three documented ways one silently stops covering your... - [What is EC2 - Other in Cost Explorer? (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/ec2-other-cost-explorer/): EC2 - Other is not a service. What the bucket holds, the usage types that break it down, and why it never appears on... - [Secrets Manager vs Parameter Store (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/secrets-manager-vs-parameter-store-cost/): AWS prices 1,500 secrets at $604.50 a month in Secrets Manager. Standard Parameter Store parameters are free. Plus a... - [How AWS credits actually apply (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/aws-credits-how-they-apply/): Soonest to expire first, largest charge first, biggest account first. Plus what credits will not cover, including... - [What VPC Flow Logs actually cost (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/vpc-flow-logs-cost/): VPC Flow Logs bill the tiered Vended Logs meter. The aggregation interval AWS overrides on Nitro, and records you pay... - [CUR 2.0 vs FOCUS: only one costs pods (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/cur-2-vs-focus/): A field-level comparison from the AWS column dictionaries: what CUR 2.0 has that FOCUS does not, and four gotchas. - [Savings Plans: coverage vs utilization (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/savings-plans-coverage-vs-utilization/): Savings Plans coverage and utilization move in opposite directions. What each low value means, and the documented order... - [What AWS KMS costs at scale (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/kms-cost/): A rotated key costs $3 a month, not $1. And S3 Bucket Keys cut KMS request charges by up to 99% with no code change. - [What cross-AZ data transfer costs (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/cross-az-data-transfer-cost/): Cross-AZ transfer is $0.01 per GB each direction, so $0.02 a round trip. What is free, what a public IP costs, and the... - [AWS Cost Optimization Hub: the gaps (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/aws-cost-optimization-hub/): EKS spend counts toward Cost Optimization Hub's efficiency score but generates no recommendations, so a wasteful... - [RDS extended support: priced per vCPU (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/rds-extended-support-cost/): RDS extended support scales with instance size, unlike EKS, and runs three years. Disabling it on a lapsed database... - [What Route 53 actually costs (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/route53-cost/): Route 53 hosted zones are not prorated, alias queries to AWS services are free, and a Resolver endpoint is about $182 a... - [What a Transit Gateway actually costs (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/transit-gateway-cost/): Transit Gateway attachment hours land on the VPC owner, not the gateway owner, and three types bill three different... - [Amortized vs unblended cost in AWS (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/amortized-vs-unblended-cost/): Five CUR cost columns, one right answer per question. When to use amortized, when unblended, and why blended cost is... - [Does a stopped EC2 instance cost money? (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/ec2-stopped-instance-cost/): A stopped EC2 instance bills no compute. The EBS volume, any Elastic IP and any Savings Plan under it do, and... - [What AWS Config actually costs (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/aws-config-cost/): You are billed per configuration item, and AWS confirms one is recorded even when no resource is created. Churn is the... - [Are AWS Glue crawlers free? (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/glue-crawler-cost/): No. Glue crawlers bill $0.44 per DPU-hour with a 10-minute minimum per crawl, so an hourly schedule costs about $1,285... - [What AWS CloudTrail actually costs (2026)](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/cloudtrail-cost/): CloudTrail's first copy of management events is free; the second costs $2.00 per 100,000, twenty times the rate of S3... ## Comparisons - [Akal Cloud vs AWS native tooling](https://akalcloud.ai/compare/aws-native-cost-tools/): Where AWS's own cost tooling stops: Extended Support surcharges, Bedrock spend and network attribution. Every claim... ## Optional - [Blog index](https://akalcloud.ai/blog/): Full index of AWS cost engineering guides, including any published after this file was read. - [X / Twitter](https://x.com/AkalCloudAI): Product announcements and AWS cost notes. - [Sitemap](https://akalcloud.ai/sitemap.xml): Every public URL with last-modified dates.