For many African startups, cloud adoption comes with a cost challenge. While AWS operates on a pay-as-you-go model, companies are often billed for resources they no longer need, forgot to shut down, or incorrectly configured.
“Cloud costs tend to creep up quietly,” Kelo Okeke, Services Director at Cumulus HQ explains. “You’re charged for what’s running, not necessarily for what’s delivering value. Over time, that can seriously hurt a company’s bottom line.”
From Cumulus HQ’s experience working with customers, cost concerns cut across company size. Some clients spend upwards of $15,000 monthly on AWS, often without a clear understanding of where inefficiencies lie. A targeted optimisation can lead to 30–40% monthly cost reductions, savings that begin reflecting almost immediately.
Offering AWS support for African companies
Founded over a year ago, Cumulus HQ is a cloud services company focused exclusively on AWS. As an AWS Partner, the company provides services that sit on top of AWS’s cloud computing platform, helping customers deploy, manage, secure, and optimise their cloud environments.
Cumulus HQ supports businesses in taking their applications from local development environments to AWS, setting up the right foundations, and maintaining those systems over time. Its services span cloud deployment, ongoing support, security posture improvement, network optimisation, and most critically for many African startups, cloud cost optimisation.
The company currently works with customers across Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya, supporting both early-stage startups and more established companies running significant monthly cloud workloads.
As cloud costs continue to strain startup budgets across Africa, Cumulus HQ, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner, is offering relief. The cloud services company, operating across Africa has announced that it is waiving its $1,000 Cloud Cost & Architecture Diagnostic fee for qualified teams, as part of an effort to help startups and growing companies regain control of their cloud spend.
The offer targets startups and SMEs already running workloads on AWS or those preparing to move to the cloud that are facing cost pressures or inefficient infrastructure setups.
What the $1,000 diagnostic covers
The Cloud Cost & Architecture Diagnostic involves a detailed review of a company’s AWS environment to identify:
According to Cumulus HQ, this type of audit directly impacts a company’s profit and loss statement. Hence, by waiving the fee for qualified teams, the company hopes to support startups that urgently need cost relief while also building long-term partnerships.
A narrow and deep AWS focus
While there are multiple AWS partners operating in Africa, Cumulus HQ believes its exclusive focus on AWS sets it apart. Unlike firms that split attention across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, Cumulus HQ works solely within the AWS ecosystem.
This narrow and deep approach allows the team to develop strong expertise and consistently apply AWS best practices across all projects, an especially important factor for startups in sensitive sectors such as fintech, where poor infrastructure decisions can have severe consequences.
Cumulus HQ says the decision to waive the diagnostic fee reflects a broader mission to support African startups and SMEs that lack the resources to hire full in-house cloud teams.
“Many of the startups we serve need cloud expertise and support with their cloud infrastructure, which sometimes tends to be a major problem for smaller companies who cannot hire people to manage that for them or deploy sufficient end-to-end resources, Pius Oladoyin, Sales Director at Cumulus HQ, said. “We are looking to support these types of startups and SMEs.”
The offer applies to existing AWS users as well as startups planning new deployments and is part of Cumulus HQ’s effort to expand its customer base while delivering measurable value.
Startups interested in the waived diagnostic can also learn more or apply via Cumulus HQ’s website.
