Comparison
FinOps consulting,or someone operating with you?
Almost every team that decides to tackle cloud cost picks between four paths. They solve different problems, and the expensive mistake is picking for the wrong reason. Here is what each one actually delivers — including when Samax is not the answer.
The four paths
None of them is wrong. What changes is where the execution work sits.
Visibility without execution
Cost management platforms consolidate invoices, break spend down by service and list opportunities. That is the foundation — without the data, nobody decides anything.
Where it wins: seeing where the money actually goes.
Where it stops: the recommendation is born in the dashboard and stays there. Someone with architectural context still has to judge whether that rightsizing takes production down, test it and apply it.
Full context, scarce capacity
A FinOps specialist in-house knows the product, the priorities and the internal politics better than any outsider.
Where it wins: business context and continuity.
Where it stops: the profile is scarce. Months pass between opening the role and the person being productive — and the spend keeps running. One bad technical hire costs more than the waste it was meant to fix.
Good diagnosis, results with an expiry date
A few-week engagement maps the offenders, delivers prioritized recommendations and sometimes an execution plan.
Where it wins: unblocking a stalled situation and bringing an outside view fast.
Where it stops: when the project ends, the routine goes back to what it was. Cloud is not a problem you solve once — new instance, new service, new team, and the waste starts growing again.
Continuous execution inside the team
Senior FinOps and DevOps working in your routine, on defined cadences: they decide, apply and follow the change through alongside your engineers.
Where it wins: the structural savings, which require presence over time.
Where it stops: it requires access and trust. If all you want is a number to take to the board, a one-off diagnostic is cheaper.
Side by side
The same four options, across the dimensions that usually decide the call.
| Criterion | Tooling | In-house | Consulting | Samax |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who executes the change | Your team | Your team | Your team, later | Samax, with you |
| Time to first result | Depends on the team | Months (hiring) | Weeks | Days |
| Sustains over time | Not on its own | Yes | No | Yes |
| Covers operations and reliability | No | Depends on the profile | Rarely | Yes, with DevOps |
| Cost | Monthly licence | Salary + overhead | Fixed-scope project | Monthly fee by scope |
Qualitative comparison between engagement models, not between specific vendors.
When Samax is not the answer
We would rather say this now than mid-contract.
- You need a one-off number for a specific decision — due diligence, annual budget, a business case. A fixed-scope diagnostic gets there faster and cheaper.
- Your cloud spend is still small enough that the effort to optimize does not pay for itself. In that case the better investment is architecture, not FinOps.
- You already have a mature FinOps team, with cadences running and unit economics in place. What is missing there is probably tooling, not people.
- Your cloud spend doesn't yet justify an embedded operation. In that case, Samax also resells your AWS, GCP or OCI invoice with a longer payment term and direct support. See Cloud Reselling
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between FinOps consulting and an embedded operation?
Consulting delivers a diagnosis, recommendations and a report; execution stays with your team. An embedded operation puts FinOps and DevOps professionals inside your routine to execute the changes and sustain the result over time. The practical difference shows up in the long tail: the quick win usually lands under both models, the structural savings only hold with continuous presence.
Doesn't a FinOps tool solve this on its own?
Tooling delivers visibility, which is a prerequisite but not a result. The recommendation shows up in the dashboard and stays there until someone with architectural context decides, tests and applies the change without taking production down. With nobody to execute, the savings stay in the report.
Does it make more sense to hire an in-house FinOps specialist?
It does, once cloud spend justifies a dedicated team and there is maturity to sustain it. The cost is time: building the capability internally takes months of recruiting and ramp-up for a scarce profile, and a bad hire is expensive. Many teams use an embedded operation to capture the savings now while building the in-house team in parallel.
What does an embedded FinOps operation cost?
At Samax the model is a recurring monthly fee, starting at R$ 3,000/month for FinOps as a Service or DevOps as a Service, priced by size and scope. The full CloudOps operation is custom. The plans are detailed on the pricing page.
Do you operate AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI?
Yes. The operation is multi-cloud, with data consolidated in the FinOps Foundation FOCUS standard and optimization cadences for AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI.
How does it start? Do I need to switch tools?
It starts with a free diagnostic using read-only integration into your cloud accounts — nothing is changed at that stage. If you already use a FinOps tool, it stays: the embedded operation works on top of the visibility you have rather than replacing it.
Find out which path is yours
The initial diagnostic connects your accounts in read-only mode, maps the main cost offenders and points to the next step — even when the next step is not hiring us.