Warehouse Cost and Egress Audit (Onboarding)

Warehouse Cost and Egress Audit (Onboarding)

1. 01

   Pull 90 days of storage, egress, and API request volumes from the client's current warehouse or object store

   Get the raw billing export, not a dashboard screenshot. Split bytes stored from bytes moved, because flat-rate object storage and per-request pricing fail in opposite directions.

2. 02

   Model the same workload against three pricing shapes: flat-rate, per-TB with free egress, and distributed network

   Wasabi's flat-rate model with no egress or API fees and Backblaze B2 at $6.95/TB/month for standard storage produce very different totals once a client's monthly egress crosses a few terabytes.

3. 03

   Flag every downstream consumer that queries the warehouse directly

   List BI tools, scheduled exports, and client-facing dashboards. A warehouse migration that breaks a retainer-critical dashboard costs more in goodwill than the storage savings return.

4. 04

   Score operational complexity against the client's internal ops capacity

   Distributed SQL tuning and self-hosted object storage demand skills most client teams do not staff. If nobody on the account can own cluster tuning, price the managed option in.

5. 05

   Confirm data residency and durability requirements in writing

   Regulated clients need region pinning and documented replication. Distributed architectures satisfy this differently than single-region buckets, so get the constraint before the architecture.

6. 06

   Draft a 12-month total cost comparison with migration labor included

   Storage savings of 60 to 80 percent are common on paper. Engineering hours to migrate, retest queries, and retrain the client's analysts routinely consume the first year of savings.

7. 07

   Set a re-audit date tied to the client's data growth rate

   If volume is growing more than 20 percent per quarter, the pricing shape that wins today may lose within two renewal cycles.