What we do
We manage the commitment side of your cloud bill
Cloud providers sell capacity cheaper if you commit to it in advance. The discounts are real and large. The catch is that committing badly is expensive, and committing well is a job. We do that job.
Coverage
All three clouds, and every commitment type they sell
All three providers sell the same two shapes. You either commit to a specific resource, which discounts hardest but only pays off if that exact thing keeps running, or you commit to an hourly spend, which discounts less but follows your workloads around.
- Amazon Web Services Reserved Instances for the resource commitment. Savings Plans for the spend commitment, across compute, machine learning and databases.
- Microsoft Azure Reservations for the resource commitment, and savings plans for the spend commitment. Two of those: one for compute, one for databases.
- Google Cloud Committed use discounts in both shapes. Resource‑based, which is Compute Engine only, and spend‑based, including the flexible commitments that span Compute Engine, GKE and Cloud Run.
Getting the mix right across all of it is most of the work. It depends on how stable each workload actually is, which is a question about your business rather than about your cloud.
The mechanism
A fourth option your cloud provider does not sell
Your cloud provider offers three ways to pay: on‑demand, a one‑year commitment, or a three‑year commitment. The longer you commit, the cheaper the rate, and the longer you are exposed if your usage moves.
We add a fourth: a Tenavant guaranteed commitment, in thirty‑day and one‑year terms. Your exposure ends when your term does, so you are never left paying for the tail of a commitment you no longer need.
| Option | You commit to | Rate | How long you are exposed |
|---|---|---|---|
| On‑demand | Nothing | The highest | Not at all. You simply pay the most. |
| Native one‑year | One year | Better | Up to a year |
| Tenavant guaranteed, thirty‑day | Thirty days | Better than on‑demand | Thirty days |
| Tenavant guaranteed, one‑year | One year | Better than a native one‑year | Up to a year, the same as native |
| Native three‑year | Three years | The lowest | Up to three years |
This gives us two moves on your bill
-
Replace your native one‑year commitments
Same one‑year term, same exposure, better rate. This one is purely an economics upgrade, and it applies to commitments you were going to buy anyway.
-
Commit the spend you could not justify committing
Most on‑demand spend is not on‑demand because anyone chose it. It is uncommitted because nobody could promise what the next twelve months hold, so signing up for a year felt reckless. Thirty days is a promise almost anyone can make, and that is usually where the largest untapped saving sits.
The one case where we tell you to buy native. A native three‑year commitment is the only thing that beats a Tenavant guaranteed commitment on rate. Where you are genuinely confident about three years of a given workload, that is what you should buy, and we will tell you so rather than sell you something else. We are happy to manage those for you as well. They are part of the same portfolio and they still need tracking, renewing and revisiting.
The arrangement
You hold the decision. We do the work.
This is the part that makes us different from software, and it is worth being precise about.
We are given authority to purchase commitments on your behalf. Every purchase is preceded by a written recommendation and a written approval from you. Nothing is ever bought on our own initiative, and the approval trail is kept for every transaction.
What that buys you is not just less work. It is a person who is accountable for the outcome, by name, rather than a tool that produced a suggestion nobody signed off on.
Why this needs a person. Knowing that a fourth option exists does not tell you how much of it to buy, against which resources, or when. That judgment is the work, and it has to be redone as your usage moves.
Reporting
Savings are quoted net, always
Every number we report is after every fee has been taken out, including ours. We do not quote gross savings, and we do not lead with a percentage.
The reason is simple. A savings figure that ignores what the service costs is not a savings figure, it is a marketing number. You should be able to take our report, compare it against your actual bill, and have the two agree.
Scope
What we do not do
Being clear about this early saves everyone time.
- We do not right‑size your infrastructure, refactor workloads, or touch your architecture. Commitments are a pricing problem, not an engineering one.
- We do not resell your cloud. Your accounts stay yours and you keep paying AWS, Azure and Google directly.
- We do not take a percentage of your savings. The fee is fixed and agreed before any work starts, so our advice does not get more expensive when it works.
- We do not sell you software. There is no dashboard to log into and no seat count.
Send us one recent cloud invoice and we will tell you what we would do with it, in writing, at no charge. [email protected]