Your Cloud Bill Is Bigger Than Your Old Data Center. That Wasn't the Plan.

Where the money is going

• Dev and test environments running 24/7 at production-sized instances because nobody set a shutdown policy
• Oversized instances provisioned "just to be safe" and never re-evaluated after the initial launch
• Orphaned storage volumes and snapshots from systems that were decommissioned months ago — still billing
• Data transfer costs nobody modeled because cloud providers don't make them obvious until the bill arrives
• Vendor lock-in that prevents competitive pricing because migrating services would take engineering time nobody has

Why cloud governance is so hard

Cloud makes provisioning fast and visible, but cost tracking slow and invisible. By the time a team sees its bill, the waste has already been running for 30 days. Without a forcing function — showback, tagging, auto-shutdown — the default behavior is to overspend.

Cloud providers have no financial incentive to make waste easy to see. Their job is to make spinning up resources frictionless. Your job is to make accountability equally frictionless.

A $200K FinOps platform doesn't fix a $50K governance problem. Start with the right policies, not the biggest tool.

Your deliverables

• The top 3 categories driving your cloud overspend — identified specifically, not generically
• Quick-win cuts you can execute this week with no engineering risk
• A governance framework to prevent costs from creeping back up after the initial reduction
• A written summary your engineering and finance teams can act on together — no translator needed

How it works

1. Pay $999 to secure the slot.
2. Intake within 24 hours — a short email asking exactly what I need.
3. Delivery within 3 days — a written output you can act on immediately.

Bring your last cloud bill and a rough description of your environment. That's usually enough to identify the biggest opportunities.

Why are cloud costs always higher than projected?

Because cloud makes it easy to spin up resources and hard to track who owns them. Without cost tagging, showback, and auto-shutdown policies, every team optimizes for convenience and someone else pays the bill. Cloud pricing is also deliberately complex — the incentive structure favors the vendor.

What percentage of cloud spend is typically wasted?

Industry data consistently shows 30–35% of cloud spend is waste — idle instances, oversized resources, orphaned storage, and dev environments that run continuously at production scale. Almost every environment we've reviewed has immediate, low-risk cuts available before any architectural changes.

How quickly can cloud costs be reduced?

Quick wins — rightsizing, turning off idle resources, eliminating orphaned storage — can be executed in 1–2 weeks and typically yield 15–25% reduction immediately. Structural changes like reserved instances and architecture optimization take longer but produce larger sustained savings.

Do we need a dedicated FinOps team?

Only if cloud spend is over $5M per year. Below that, the problem is usually governance and tagging, not a dedicated team. Start with clear ownership and the right guardrails — that's usually enough. A FinOps team without governance infrastructure just creates an expensive reporting function.