AWS Cost Audit Needed for Photo Finder App — SageMaker / Hosting Costs Too High

We had a custom internal photo finder/database app built for our wall art business. The app is used to search and organize approximately 30,000 images. The app was built by another developer/team, but after launch we discovered the AWS monthly costs are very high for what the app is — close to $500-600/month. A recent AWS billing breakdown shows Amazon SageMaker as the main cost driver, with additional smaller costs from EC2, Load Balancing, VPC, and other AWS services. We have tried contacting the original developer/team for clarification, but they are currently not responding, so we need an independent AWS specialist to review the setup and help us understand what is going on. At this stage, we are not looking to rebuild the app immediately. We first need a short audit to determine: How the app is currently set up on AWS - Why the monthly costs are so high - Whether SageMaker is necessary for normal app usage - Whether any endpoints, notebooks, training jobs, or inference services are running continuously - Whether the architecture is overbuilt for an internal image search tool - What can be adjusted to bring the monthly cost down - Whether this can be fixed without rebuilding the whole app Deliverables Please provide a short written report covering: - Main AWS cost drivers - What SageMaker is being used for - Whether any AWS services appear unnecessary or overbuilt - Specific steps to reduce monthly costs - Estimated monthly AWS cost after optimization - Whether this can likely be fixed without a full rebuild Ideal Candidate You should have experience with: - AWS Cost Explorer - SageMaker pricing and usage - AWS cost optimization - EC2, S3, VPC, Load Balancers, CloudWatch, RDS/OpenSearch if applicable - Reviewing cloud architecture built by another developer - Explaining technical findings clearly to a non-technical business owner Experience with image search, AI image tagging, embeddings, vector search, or photo database apps is a plus. Please Include In your proposal, please briefly answer: Have you reduced SageMaker or AWS hosting costs before? What would you check first in this situation? Can you complete an initial audit within 1–2 hours and provide a written summary? If optimization is needed afterward, would you be able to provide a separate estimate?