---
title: "Cost Advisor"
description: "AI analysis of your account-wide usage and spend: VM right-sizing, waste detection and capacity pressure, with specific recommendations in real dollar amounts."
url: "https://edge.network/docs/account/cost-advisor"
section: "Account & support"
---

# Cost Advisor

An AI review of everything you run on Edge (VM utilisation, storage, CDN traffic, DNS and add-ons) that identifies wasted spend and capacity pressure, with specific recommendations and the dollar amounts to back them up.

> [!TIP]
> **Included with every account.** The Cost Advisor is free to run, as often as you like. If it finds ways for you to pay us less, it says so. That's the point.

## How to use it

1. Open **Billing** in the console and switch to the **Cost Advisor** tab.
2. Click **Analyse My Account**. The analysis covers your last 7 days of resource metrics and takes about 30 seconds.
3. Review the efficiency score, spend breakdown, VM utilisation charts and prioritised recommendations. Each one names the exact resource and the action to take.

## What it analyses

- **VM right-sizing:** Seven days of CPU, memory and disk metrics per VM. A VM averaging 3% CPU with low memory use gets a downsize recommendation and the exact monthly saving; a VM pinned at 100% gets an upgrade recommendation instead.
- **Waste detection:** Stopped VMs still paying for allocated disk, unused extra IPs, forgotten snapshots and add-ons you may no longer need: everything idle that still costs money.
- **Capacity pressure:** Usage approaching plan limits, memory above 85%, disks nearly full. These are situations where more capacity costs less than the outage it prevents.
- **Plan fit:** Whether your total usage fits a cheaper plan, whether annual billing would save you money and, for pay-as-you-go accounts, where your hourly spend actually goes.
- **Protection gaps:** Production VMs without snapshots, DNS zones without [backups](/docs/dns/backups), low CDN cache-hit rates hammering your origin. These are cheap fixes that prevent expensive problems.

## Recommendation types

Every recommendation carries a monthly dollar figure, so you can see exactly what acting on it does to your bill.

| Type | Badge | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Saving | Save $X/mo | Genuine waste. Downsizing, removing or consolidating cuts your bill by this amount. |
| Investment | +$X/mo | More capacity or an upgrade where the data shows pressure. Costs more; prevents worse. |
| Protection | Protection | Backups, snapshots and resilience gaps worth closing. |
| Free | Free | Configuration improvements that cost nothing, such as cache tuning and housekeeping. |

## Efficiency score

Each analysis produces a spend-efficiency score from 0 to 100. It measures how well your resources match your actual usage.

| Score | Rating | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 80–100 | Well optimised | Resources match usage; little or no wasted spend found. |
| 50–79 | Room to improve | Some over-provisioned or idle resources worth acting on. |
| 0–49 | Significant waste | Meaningful monthly savings available from right-sizing. |

## How the dollar amounts work

Savings are computed from your real pricing, never estimated by the AI:

- **Pay-as-you-go accounts:** Compute bills hourly, so downsizing or deleting a VM is a direct cash saving at the published per-resource rates. Stopped VMs still pay for their allocated disk, and the Advisor will tell you so.
- **Subscription plans:** Compute is included in your plan, so downsizing a VM frees headroom rather than cutting the bill. The real saving the Advisor looks for is whether your total usage fits a cheaper plan.

If your account is already efficient, the report says so and lists what you're doing right. The Advisor never pads a report to look useful. It will also sometimes recommend spending more, when seven days of data show a resource under real pressure.

## What data it uses

The Advisor works from aggregate usage data only: per-VM resource metrics, storage totals, CDN request counts, DNS query volumes, add-on inventory and your plan's pricing. It never reads the contents of your VMs, buckets or zones.

## Saved results

Analyses are saved automatically. When you return to the Cost Advisor tab, your most recent report is shown with the date and time it was run. Click **Re-analyse** at any time for a fresh report. Your last ten reports are kept.