Cost Questions

Find the answer your CFO is asking for, before they finish typing the email.

What Escher is great at

You ask	What you get	Time
"Why did our bill spike last week?"	Root cause + responsible change + dollar impact	~4 min
"Where is our biggest waste right now?"	Top 10 waste items ranked by recoverable spend	~3 min
"Are our Savings Plans / RIs covering the right workloads?"	Coverage analysis + commitments at risk of being orphaned	~5 min
"What's our cost per team this month?"	Tag-based attribution + anomalies vs last month	~3 min
"Which idle resources can we kill?"	Inventory of running-but-unused resources with last-active time	~4 min

Example: "Why did our bill spike?"

You type:

"Why did our AWS bill jump 60% last week?"

Escher returns a Canvas:

Conclusion: A misconfigured Lambda function in the data-pipeline
account caused $8,400 of CloudWatch Logs ingestion charges
between Mar 12 and Mar 14.

Root cause:
  Deployment: pipeline-v2.4.1 (Mar 12, 14:22 UTC)
  Change:     Logging level set to DEBUG in production
  Author:     alice@company.com

Affected resources:
  Function:   data-pipeline-transform (us-east-1)
  Log group:  /aws/lambda/data-pipeline-transform
  Volume:     2.1 TB over 2 days (vs 18 GB baseline)

Remediation:
  Revert log level to INFO         → saves $4,200/week
  Set CloudWatch retention to 7d   → saves $1,800/month

Evidence: 12 citations attached.

You can:

Click any citation to see the underlying CloudTrail event, deployment, or billing line
Export the Canvas as PDF for the post-mortem
Approve the recommended remediation (Escher applies the change with your consent and captures evidence)

Example: "Where is our biggest waste?"

"Find our top 10 cost waste items in production."

Returns a ranked list — typically including idle EC2 / VMs, unattached EBS volumes, oversized RDS instances, orphaned NAT gateways, and untagged resources blocking accurate attribution.

For each item: estimated monthly savings, blast-radius assessment, and a one-click remediation when safe.

Tips that get better cost answers

TIP

Anchor to a time window. "Last week," "this month," "since the v2.4 deploy" — Escher uses the window to scope its analysis.

TIP

Mention the account or environment. Without a scope, Escher considers everything you've connected. With one, the answer is faster and more targeted.

TIP

Ask "why" not "what." "Why did X spike?" produces a root-cause Canvas. "What is X?" produces an inventory.

What's next

Security Questions
Incident Questions
FinOps Skill — What FinOps analysis includes

Cost Questions ​

What Escher is great at ​

Example: "Why did our bill spike?" ​

Example: "Where is our biggest waste?" ​