Comparison
nOps alternative: automation platform vs. human-verified audit
nOps is an automation platform — continuous commitment management, spot orchestration and optimisation, typically priced as a percentage of savings or spend (as of mid-2026 — verify current terms on their site). Automation suits ongoing, repetitive decisions. The question for an SME is what you need first: standing machinery, or a one-time deep clean with a human check on every finding.
Start with the number: the free scan shows what a deep clean would recover, before any platform subscription.
Run the free scanAutomation vs. audit
- →Continuous automation vs. one-time depth. Platforms like nOps continuously manage commitments and capacity — valuable when usage shifts weekly. The audit is a point-in-time deep read of everything, including the categories automation doesn’t touch: orphaned storage, dead log groups, extended-support fees, forgotten regions.
- →Percentage-of-savings vs. fixed fee. Savings-share pricing scales with your bill and continues as long as the platform runs. £499 is once, known in advance, and the guarantee (20%+ found or free) carries the risk instead of the pricing model.
- →Machine confidence vs. human verification. Automated actions need high confidence, so platforms act conservatively on the unambiguous cases. Our audit pairs 70+ automated checks with human verification, which is how the judgment-call findings — the memory-bound "idle" instance, the compliance-relevant log group — get called correctly.
- →Access model. Standing platforms hold ongoing write access to act in your account. The scan is a read-only role you create and delete; the audit changes nothing — you (or we, in the retainer) apply fixes deliberately.
Put numbers on it
Frequently asked questions
Is savings-share pricing bad?
Not inherently — it aligns incentives for continuous services. The trade-off is that it keeps billing against savings the platform maintains, and percentage pricing on a growing bill grows with it. For a one-time cleanup of accumulated waste, fixed-price with a guarantee is simpler to reason about; for perpetual commitment management at scale, savings-share can be fair.
Could we use the audit and an automation platform together?
Yes, in that order: the audit clears the backlog and tells you what your real baseline is; automation then manages commitments against that clean baseline. Automating on top of an account full of idle resources optimises the waste along with the workload.
£499 fixed. Free scan first. 20%+ found or it’s free.
The scan is read-only — a role you create and delete, no keys shared — and shows your estimated monthly saving before anyone talks about money.