Comparison
Vantage alternative: audit vs. dashboard
Vantage is a well-regarded cost observability platform — dashboards, reports, anomaly alerts across AWS and other providers, with a free tier and subscription pricing that scales with spend (as of mid-2026). The distinction that matters: a dashboard shows you the spend. It doesn’t look at your account and tell you which 40 resources to fix, in what order, for how much saving. That’s audit work.
The free scan is the audit’s first pass — see what systematic coverage finds that the dashboard hasn’t.
Run the free scanDashboard vs. audit — the honest split
- →Continuous visibility vs. point-in-time depth. Vantage watches trends over time and alerts on anomalies — genuinely useful once your account is clean. An audit goes deep once: every region, every resource class, evidence per finding, a ranked fix list. Different jobs.
- →Who does the work. A platform gives your team data; your team still does the investigation and remediation. Our audit hands you conclusions: this instance is idle (here’s 14 days of evidence), this volume should be gp3, this is the Savings Plan to buy. Your team executes fixes, not research.
- →Cost shape. Subscriptions bill monthly and scale with your spend, forever. The audit is £499 once, and the optional £149/month monitoring retainer exists only if you want ongoing eyes afterwards.
- →They compose. Genuinely: audit first to clear the backlog of accumulated waste, then a visibility tool (Vantage or otherwise) to keep the cleaned account honest. Running a dashboard over a wasteful account just charts the waste in higher resolution.
Put numbers on it
Frequently asked questions
We already use Vantage. Would an audit still find anything?
Usually yes — visibility tools surface what teams look at, and busy teams look at the top lines. The audit’s value is systematic coverage: the forgotten region, the orphaned snapshots, the extended-support fee nobody knew existed, the log group ingesting £200/month of debug output. Tools show; audits conclude.
Why not just build dashboards ourselves with Cost Explorer?
Cost Explorer is free and worth using — it shows spend by service and time. What it cannot do is tell you whether a specific instance is idle, a volume is unattached, or an engine version is accruing fees. That takes reading the account resource by resource against utilisation data, which is exactly what the scan automates.
£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.