MAKAO Labs finds what's burning money inside your AWS account — idle resources, overprovisioned services, gaps in your pipeline — and hands you a roadmap you can act on, with or without us.
AWS pricing and tooling assumes you have a FinOps team, a dedicated DevOps function, and weeks to read documentation. Most African startups have none of those. The bill grows. The engineers blame each other. The CTO has no visibility.
Your billing dashboard shows a number. It doesn't tell you which team, which service, which decision made it grow 40% last quarter.
Fragile CI/CD, no rollback strategy, manual deployments at 2am — the infrastructure works until it doesn't. And when it doesn't, everyone finds out at once.
AWS's default configurations are optimised for companies with millions in ARR. Your staging environment costs almost as much as production and nobody notices.
Most founders start with the audit and graduate to advisory. You don't have to buy them all — but they're designed to work together.
Script + MAKAO Agent · One-off or continuous
We run our open-source audit script inside your own AWS account — nothing external, no agent installed on your servers, no credentials shared. You get a prioritised findings report with actual dollar savings against each item, and a backlog of tasks your team can execute independently.
Want continuous monitoring? MAKAO Agent runs weekly inside your account and emails your team a digest — no dashboard to log into, no new tool to learn.
Architecture · Security · Reliability
We map your full AWS environment — services, dependencies, IAM, networking — and assess it against production-readiness standards. You learn what's fragile, what's a security risk, and what can be simplified. Ideal before a funding round, a new CTO, or a major product launch.
CI/CD · DORA Metrics · Team Maturity
If your engineers are deploying manually, rolling back by luck, or can't tell you your deployment frequency — this is the service. We build or fix your pipelines, introduce DORA metrics tracking, and leave your team running independently. No lock-in, no dependency on us.
Strategic · Ongoing · Embedded
Monthly check-ins, quarterly deep dives, on-call access during critical moments. We review your infrastructure decisions before they become expensive mistakes, help you evaluate new AWS services before adoption, and track cost and reliability KPIs alongside your business metrics.
The Agent deploys as an AWS Lambda inside your own account. It scans weekly, writes findings to your DynamoDB, and emails your team a digest. No raw data ever leaves your environment. No dashboard to log into. No vendor dependency.
The Agent runs with a bare-minimum IAM role inside your VPC. Your data never crosses the boundary. Modelled after the same design philosophy as Kubernetes-native tooling.
Every Monday your engineering lead receives a structured email: new waste found this week, total identified savings, and the top 3 recommended actions.
Cloud costs should be observed like latency or error rate — continuously, not quarterly. The Agent makes cost a first-class signal in your engineering workflow.
Scans all your active regions automatically. Covers EC2, RDS, EBS, S3, Lambda, and Compute Optimizer recommendations — in a single weekly run.
We go beyond the low-hanging fruit. We interview your teams, read your Terraform, and give you a backlog of tasks your engineers can execute on their own — whether you continue with us or not.
Most engagements move from call to findings report within a week. Here's what to expect.
30 minutes. We learn your stack, your team, and what's keeping your CTO up at night. No sales deck, no pressure.
You grant read-only access inside your own VPC. The audit script runs and writes findings to a local report. Nothing leaves your cloud.
We present the findings to your engineering and product leads. Every item has a dollar value and a clear recommendation — not just a warning.
Take the roadmap and run with it internally, continue with us for implementation, or deploy the Agent for ongoing monitoring. Your call.
We're not a global consultancy with a generic AWS cost-optimisation playbook. We've built cloud infrastructure for African startups at seed, Series A, and Series B — we understand the constraints.
USD-denominated AWS bills on KES revenue. Lean engineering teams. Unpredictable traffic. We design for the actual constraints of scaling on this continent.
Every tool we deploy runs inside your own AWS account. No credentials shared, no data transmitted to external systems. Increasingly important as African data regulation tightens.
Every engagement ends with documentation your engineers can follow independently. We hand you a backlog, a runbook, and the knowledge to act without us.
The audit is free. The call is 30 minutes. The findings usually surprise people — not because the problems are unusual, but because nobody had looked before.
30 minutes, no prep required, no commitment. We'll tell you whether we can help.
+254 701 008 108 — usually respond within a few hours on weekdays.
Prefer email? hello@makao-labs.com · Based in Nairobi, available across East Africa