How it works
The parts worth understanding before you trust a number it gives you.
Scanning
Every few hours CloudPilot inventories your accounts, pulls 14 days of CloudWatch metrics and your Cost Explorer history, then runs 19 rules over the result. A permission failure in one account or region is recorded and the scan continues — partial results beat none.
Pricing model
On-demand price scales linearly with size inside an instance family, so one base price per family plus a size factor reproduces the public price list closely. The AWS Price List API is used where credentials allow. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans are not modelled, so forecasts for covered resources overstate the benefit.
Kubernetes allocation
A node's price splits 65% to CPU and 35% to memory. Each pod is charged
its share of the node's allocatable capacity on
max(request, usage). Capacity no pod claims is reported as
unallocated — that is where consolidation savings come from.
Realized savings
For each executed action, the affected service's average daily spend over the 14 days before is compared with the 14 days after, scaled to 30.44 days. It is attribution, not isolation: unrelated changes to the same service land in the same delta, and the report says so.
Safety
Dry run by default, human approval per action, read-only accounts never touched, destructive actions gated behind a separate flag. Pre-state is captured before every change, which is what makes rollback real.
What the rules won't say
An instance with under 48 hours of metrics is never called idle. Low average CPU with real peaks reads as a batch worker. A downsize that would push projected p95 past 70% is withheld. A snapshot backing an AMI is never proposed for deletion, re-checked at execution time.
Licensing questions we actually get asked
Does my cost data leave my account?
No. The licence check sends aggregate counts only — how many accounts, clusters and open findings, and the total identified saving. No resource ids, no account ids, no per-service cost.
What if your licence server is down?
Your install keeps running on its cached entitlement through a grace period, then falls back to the free tier. It never stops or locks you out.
Can I run it fully air-gapped?
The free tier, yes — it needs no licence check at all. Paid tiers need periodic outbound HTTPS to the licence server. Talk to us if you need a fully offline arrangement.
What happens when I cancel?
The install drops to the free tier at its next check-in. Your database, history and audit log stay exactly where they are — on your disk.