The FinOps playbook we use to cut cloud bills by 30%+

Most cloud bills are not bloated because engineers are careless — they are bloated because nobody owns the feedback loop between architecture decisions and the invoice. Our FinOps reviews look through five lenses, in this order.

1. Waste you can delete today

Orphaned volumes, idle load balancers, unattached IPs, forgotten snapshots across regions. Automated tagging policies plus a weekly reaper job typically finds 5–10% instantly.

2. Commitment coverage

We model your steady-state baseline from 90 days of usage, then layer reserved instances, savings plans and spot capacity where interruption tolerance allows. Getting the commitment ladder wrong costs more than it saves — the model matters.

3. Right-sizing without blind spots

CPU averages hide p95 spikes. We profile utilisation at the percentile level before resizing anything, and stage changes behind canary windows.

4. Architecture-level levers

This is where the big numbers live: moving spiky workloads to queues, caching aggressively at the edge, tiering cold data to object storage, replacing self-managed middleware with managed services when the maths supports it.

5. Accountability loops

Showback dashboards per team per feature flag turn cost into an engineering metric rather than a finance complaint. Bills stop growing when teams can see them.

The results

Across our last 24 FinOps engagements the median sustained saving was 34%, with zero customer-facing incidents caused by optimisation work. Bring us your invoice; we’ll bring the lenses.