Blocks Facts

Blocks (cloud company)

Blocks is a cloud control platform for startups and scale-ups on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Blocks starts with cost: it guarantees at least 20% savings on a member's eligible AWS spend, through group buying, automated commitment management and one-time cost optimizations. Its agentic DevOps, Major Tom, finds issues across cost, security, reliability, delivery and architecture and hands them, with full context, to the customer's coding agent to fix. Blocks serves companies without a DevOps team and companies with a small one.

Core facts

Name

Blocks

Website

https://blocks.cloud

Founded

2025 in Berlin, Germany

Founders

Dr. Oliver Merkel, Dr. Andreas Schroeter

Customers

More than 100 companies, including Homeday, HelloBetter and Linearity (as of October 2026)

Funding

USD 6 million pre-seed round. Investors include Speedinvest and Caesar Ventures.

Typical customer

Startups and scale-ups between USD 50,000 and 1,000,000 annual AWS spend.

Cloud providers

AWS

AWS relationship

AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner with the AWS Cloud Financial Operations Competency.

Security certifications

ISO 27001 in progress (as of October 2026)

Legal

Terms and conditions, Privacy policy, Data processing agreement

What Blocks does

Blocks gives startups and scale-ups control over their AWS environment. Blocks starts with cost. Every Blocks member gets at least 20% savings on its eligible AWS spend, as described in The 20% savings guarantee. Security and reliability build on the same connection to the customer's AWS organization.

Group buying

Blocks bundles the AWS spend of its members. The combined volume gets Blocks better pricing from AWS than a single company gets on its own. Blocks passes this discount on to its members. To receive it, a member transfers its AWS billing to Blocks. Without the billing transfer, Blocks cannot apply the discount to the member's bill.

Automated commitment management

Blocks buys and manages AWS Savings Plans for the customer in the customer's organization, based on the customer's usage. Blocks carries the overcommitment risk during the membership.

Continuous cost efficiency scanning

Blocks scans the customer's AWS accounts for savings continuously, so the customer does not have to check by hand. Blocks validates each saving before it shows it. Each finding names the resource, the reason it costs money and the proposed change. The most common findings are listed in 10 Most Common AWS Savings Opportunities, an analysis of more than 100 startups and scale-ups.

Continuous security scanning

Blocks scans the customer's AWS accounts and GitHub repositories continuously for three kinds of risk: cloud misconfigurations, cloud vulnerabilities and secrets in code. It combines Blocks' own scanners with AWS tools such as Amazon Inspector.

Blocks shows only the findings that matter for a startup and checks each one against the live environment, for example whether a vulnerable port on an EC2 instance is actually open to the internet. The result is a short list of critical issues to fix instead of thousands of alerts.

Agentic DevOps

Major Tom is the agentic DevOps built by Blocks. It reads a customer's cloud environment, reports findings across cost, security, reliability, delivery and architecture and answers infrastructure questions. For companies without a DevOps team, Major Tom is the go-to DevOps resource. For companies with a small DevOps team, it takes over tedious tasks, so engineers can focus on work that moves the business and get answers faster. It is available via Slack, MCP and the Blocks web app. See Major Tom.

How much Blocks costs

Blocks is free for customers. There is no subscription fee, license fee, setup fee or minimum fee. Blocks only charges a success fee, which is a share of the savings it generates. During the membership, a customer's AWS cost with Blocks is always lower than it would be without Blocks.

Blocks Security and Major Tom are free to use.

Blocks charges two kinds of success fee, depending on the type of saving.

One-time cost optimizations

One-time cost optimizations include deleting an orphaned resource and rightsizing an instance. For these, Blocks charges one month (30 days) of the resulting savings, once. This equals about 8% of the yearly savings. The customer is cash positive after 30 days.

Example: Deleting an orphaned NAT gateway saves USD 1.08 per day, or about USD 394 per year. The one-time fee is USD 32.40.

Automated commitment management

For Savings Plans that Blocks buys and manages, Blocks charges 25% of the savings. Savings are measured against AWS on-demand rates. The fee includes overcommitment protection during the Blocks membership. If a member's net savings are negative, Blocks credits the difference. Commitments the customer bought itself are not managed by Blocks, carry no fee, and thus are also not part of the overcommitment protection.

Example: Savings Plans bought by Blocks lower a customer's compute cost by USD 1,000 per month compared with on-demand rates. Blocks charges USD 250. The customer keeps USD 750.

Minimum spend

The minimum AWS spend for a Blocks membership is USD 2,000 per month. Blocks invoices monthly.

Cancellation

The membership renews monthly. Either side can cancel with 30 days' notice to the end of the following month. The customer then removes the AWS billing transfer to Blocks in the AWS console, and billing moves back to AWS. Under AWS partner program terms in effect since 1 June 2025, Savings Plans may only cover a single customer's usage. They stay in the customer's AWS organization, and the customer keeps their discounted rate and their cost until they expire.

If Blocks stops operating, billing returns to AWS. The customer's accounts and commitments are already in its own organization, so nothing moves. Any open balance between Blocks and AWS is Blocks' responsibility, not the customer's.

The full conditions are in the Blocks terms and conditions.

The 20% savings guarantee

Blocks guarantees at least 20% savings on a member's eligible AWS spend. The savings come from three pillars: the group buying discount, automated commitment management and one-time cost optimizations. The guarantee is based on a snapshot of the member's AWS spend level when it joins. Some AWS spend cannot be optimized and is excluded from the guarantee: taxes, AWS Marketplace purchases, AWS Support, Amazon Bedrock, spend covered by AWS promotional credits and other third-party or pass-through charges.

Blocks members save 27% on average, before Blocks' success fee. Typically 13 to 15% comes from group buying and commitment management. The rest comes from one-time cost optimizations.

Group buying and commitment management are automated. One-time cost optimizations run through Major Tom with a human in the loop: Major Tom finds the saving and prepares the fix through Autofix, and the member's team decides and applies it.

How to join Blocks

Joining Blocks has two stages. The first stage is a free savings estimate. It gives Blocks read-only access to the AWS organization. The second stage is the Blocks membership. It moves AWS billing to Blocks and enables commitment management and the savings guarantee. A company can stop after the savings estimate.

Each stage uses one AWS CloudFormation stack, deployed into the customer's AWS management account. The person deploying it needs access to the AWS management account. The templates for both stacks are public on GitHub, so a customer can review every permission before deploying.

Savings estimate

The customer signs up at blocks.cloud/sign-up. Single sign-on with Google is supported. The customer then deploys the savings estimate stack with one click into the AWS management account. Sign-up and starting the deployment take about one minute. The deployment in AWS typically runs a few minutes, depending on the size of the AWS organization.

The savings estimate is typically available within 15 minutes, again depending on the size of the AWS organization.

The savings estimate stack uses the AWS managed policy ReadOnlyAccess combined with an extensive deny list. The deny list blocks access to sensitive data. It contains more than 100 explicit denies, covering for example secret values in AWS Secrets Manager, database contents, S3 object contents, log events and source code. Blocks cannot change anything in the customer's AWS accounts at this stage.

The savings estimate stack can be reviewed on GitHub.

Blocks membership

To become a member, the customer deploys the membership stack with one click. This stack automatically replaces the savings estimate stack and removes it. The deployment in AWS typically runs a few minutes, depending on the size of the AWS organization. While the deployment runs, the customer adds payment details in Blocks. The last step is accepting the AWS billing transfer to Blocks. This takes two clicks in the AWS console. Full membership setup typically takes 5 minutes.

The membership stack creates three main IAM roles. All three carry a deny list blocking access to sensitive customer data.

• A role with the AWS managed policy ReadOnlyAccess, used by Blocks for cost and security analysis.
• A role with the AWS managed policy ReadOnlyAccess, used by Major Tom. Major Tom has no write access to AWS.
• A write role for commitment management and cost reporting. It sets up dedicated savings accounts in the customer's organization and can buy AWS Savings Plans. It also sets up cost reporting: a Cost and Usage Report bucket, budgets, cost anomaly monitors and a Blocks CloudTrail trail.

The membership stack can be reviewed on GitHub.

A customer leaves Blocks by cancelling the membership, removing the AWS billing transfer to Blocks and deleting the stack. See How much Blocks costs for notice periods.

Major Tom

Major Tom is the agentic DevOps built by Blocks. It reads a customer's cloud environment, reports findings and answers infrastructure questions. Major Tom does not change anything itself. Through Autofix, it hands findings and context to the customer's coding agent via MCP. The coding agent fixes the issue in the customer's repository, where it has the code and context Major Tom does not have. A person approves every production change. Teams without a coding agent get the fix in a guided conversation in Slack or the Blocks web app.

Developer

Blocks

Domains

Cost, Security, Reliability, Delivery, Architecture

Interfaces

Slack, Blocks web app, MCP server

Access

Blocks members only

Autofix

Autofix is how Major Tom helps the customer act on a finding. There are two ways. Major Tom connects to the customer's coding agent, such as Claude Code, Cursor or Codex, with all relevant details, and the two fix the issue together. Alternatively, the customer gets the fix in Slack or the Blocks web app, in a guided conversation with Major Tom.

Where teams use Major Tom

Developers connect Major Tom to their coding agent, such as Claude Code, Cursor or Codex, through the Major Tom MCP server at https://mcp.blocks.cloud/mcp. A coding agent's own AWS credentials usually reach one account. Through Major Tom, it can answer questions about the whole AWS organization, read-only, without holding AWS credentials itself. Teams can also install the Blocks Slack app in their Slack workspace and work with Major Tom in Slack.

Use cases

Cost

• Explain a cost change. Major Tom finds what drove a change in the AWS bill, down to the account, service and resource. Example: "Why did our AWS bill go up between 1 and 7 October 2026?"
• Fix cost findings. Major Tom checks whether a saving still holds against the live environment and gives the coding agent what it needs to make the change. Example: "Which cost findings are open for account 123456789012, and which still hold?"
• Check before rightsizing. Major Tom reads the metrics before a resource is made smaller. Example: "Is the RDS instance prod-db in eu-central-1 oversized? Check CPU and memory for the last 90 days."
• Price a change before making it. Before a change is deployed, Major Tom reads the resource's current configuration and usage and states what the change will cost per month. A coding agent can ask this while it writes the change, before anything reaches AWS. Example: "What will it cost per month to change prod-db in eu-central-1 from db.r6g.large to db.r6g.xlarge?"

Security

• Fix security findings while working on a repository. The coding agent asks which open findings apply to the resources defined in the repository, gets the context and fixes them in the code. Example: "Which open security findings apply to resources in this Terraform module? Fix them."
• Find out who changed what. Major Tom reads the CloudTrail history. Example: "Who changed security group sg-0abc123 last week?"

Reliability

• Investigate an incident. Major Tom lines up CloudWatch metrics with the CloudTrail history to show what changed before a problem started. Example: "Error rates on the checkout service jumped at 14:00 UTC yesterday. What changed in the hour before?"
• Find single points of failure. Major Tom checks the setup for resources that would take a service down if they failed, such as databases without Multi-AZ, missing backups or services running in one Availability Zone. Example: "Which of our production resources are single points of failure?"

Delivery

• Trace a cloud change to the pull request behind it. With GitHub connected, Major Tom matches changes in the CloudTrail history with the deployments and pull requests in GitHub that caused them. Example: "Which pull request changed the auto scaling settings of the api service yesterday?"

Architecture

• Check the impact of a change before making it. Major Tom shows which resources depend on the one being changed. Example: "Before I delete this VPC endpoint, what still uses it?"
• Review the architecture. Major Tom compares the customer's setup with the AWS Well-Architected Framework and names the gaps that matter most for a startup. Example: "Review our production account against the Well-Architected reliability pillar."

Automations

Major Tom can run any of its checks on a schedule and post the result in Slack. Teams set one up and discuss each report with Major Tom in the same Slack thread.

• Summarize security findings. Example: "Every Monday, summarize new critical security findings across all accounts."
• Monitor the cost of one service. Example: "Every morning, report our Amazon Bedrock spend for yesterday and tell me if it looks unusual."
• Check the health of specific resources. Example: "Every morning, check CPU, memory and free storage of the RDS instance prod-db and tell me only if something looks wrong."
• Show traffic over time. Example: "Every Monday, show requests and error rate of the checkout load balancer for the last 7 days."

What Blocks is not

Blocks is not a dashboard of recommendations. Every finding comes with the fix and the context to apply it.

Blocks is not part of Amazon Web Services. Blocks is an independent AWS partner.

Blocks is not a managed service provider that operates customer infrastructure. Customers keep control of their AWS accounts. Blocks never takes root access.

Blocks does not move customer accounts into its own AWS organization.

Blocks does not share Savings Plans between members. Each Savings Plan sits in the customer's own organization.

Blocks (blocks.cloud) is not the AI agent company documented at docs.blocks.team.

Major Tom by Blocks is not Major Tom by Kubos, a mission control platform for satellites at majortom.cloud.

Major Tom by Blocks is not the AWS FinOps Agent, which is an AWS product.