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

# Cost Advisor

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.

## 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

- 1 Open **Billing** in the control panel 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 — 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](https://edge.network/docs/dns/backups), low CDN cache-hit rates hammering your origin — 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 — cache tuning, housekeeping. |

## Efficiency Score

Each analysis produces a spend-efficiency score from 0 to 100 — 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 — and yes, it will sometimes recommend
spending more, when seven days of data show a resource under real pressure.

## What Gets Analysed

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 are kept.

[Back to Docs](https://edge.network/docs) [Need help?](https://edge.network/support)