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Is your cloud bill going up every month even though your usage hasn’t increased much? You’re not the only one. Startups, SaaS companies, and even big companies in various industries experience this problem after migrating to the cloud.

Cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud focus on delivering scalability and speed. However, without proper financial governance, they may start eating up the budget. Knowing what causes your cloud bills to keep increasing is a good start toward solving your problem. FinOps is exactly the tool that will help you do this.

What Are the True Reasons Behind Skyrocketing Cloud Bills?

It’s typical for companies to think that increasing cloud costs are a result of higher usage. However, their cloud bill keeps increasing due to hidden inefficiencies, lack of visibility, and no clear accountability.

1. Overprovisioned Resources

Frequently, cloud environments are designed to handle maximum capacity, but this maximum load is rarely sustained all the time. Consequently, teams tend to over-provision:

• Compute instances
• Memory and CPU
• Storage volumes

You’re being charged every hour for these resources, which are running but are not being utilised.

2. Idle & Forgotten Cloud Assets

The cloud environment changes frequently. Most of the time, old environments, test servers, unused databases, and abandoned storage are not only forgotten butare still running.

Idle resources are a major cause of monthly cloud costs that keep creeping up.

3. Pay-As-You-Go Without Guardrails

Pay-as-you-go is a flexible approach on paper, but how flexible it really is if you don’t have:

• Budgets
• Alerts
• Usage limits

In the absence of these, teams can go ahead and deploy services without worrying about their cost impact. Then, the end of the month comes and there are surprise charges.

4. No Cost Ownership Across Teams

Oftentimes in oan rganisation:

• Engineering teams just focus on delivering quickly
• Finance teams only get to see invoices
• Leadership finds out about costs too late

If no one is responsible for cloud costs, you can expect them to increase unchecked.

5. Incorrect Pricing Models

Maximising on on-demand pricing and not considering that your loads are predictable is a common mistake among companies. Without:

• Reserved Instances
• Savings Plans
• Long-term optimisation strategies

You are paying way more than what you need to.

6. Lack of Visibility & Forecasting

When your only cloud cost check is after you have already received the bill, you’re too late. On without real-time dashboards and forecasting:

• Cost trends go unnoticed
• Spikes aren’t detected early
• Budgets become unreliable

Why Cost-Cutting Is Ineffective in the Cloud

Trying to reduce cloud costs by:

• Randomly deleting resources
• Freezing infrastructure changes
• Cutting performance

This strategy is very risky and can only last for a short time. Controlling and optimising cloud costs is where the real value lies.

This is what FinOps brings to the table.

How FinOps Stops Cloud Bills From Going Up

FinOps (Financial Operations) refers to a cloud financial management framework which aligns finance, engineering, and operations team working together to efficiently manage cloud costs.

So, here are the ways FinOps addresses the main reasons for increasing cloud bills.

1. Complete Cost Visibility

FinOps breaks down the cost visibility to a granular level from one point in time to:

• Exactly who is incurring the cost
• To the extent of each service
• Path to costs

Through this, guesswork is out of the question, and transparency is in the equation.

2. Cost Allocation & Accountability

The FinOps practice of dividing cloud costs by:

• Team
• Product
• Environment

This is because if a team notices how their actions lead to expenses, they will naturally be more mindful of their spending.

3. Continuous Cloud Cost Optimisation

Being a core FinOps principle, there is no finishing line. A few examples include:

• Right-sizing the instances
• Decommissioning of unused assets
• Refining pricing plans

The majority of the organisations manage to cut their cloud expenses by 20-40% in just a few months.

4. Smart Budgeting & Forecasting

FinOps makes it possible to:

• Predict the cloud expenses accurately
• Set budget thresholds
• Have notifications in real-time

You won’t have to endure this distress over the past month’s bill again.

5. Performance-Safe Optimisation

FinOps doesn’t sacrifice:

• Any performance to get the cost down
• The development speed doesn’t have to pause or slow down
• Scalability is not being compromised

The business can keep on growing, but with minimum wastefulness.

Who Is the Target of FinOps?

FinOps applies to:

• Startups, which are rapidly burning their cash with cloud infrastructure costs
• SaaS companies that are experiencing a reduction in margins
• Large-scale enterprises with a complex cloud environment
• CTOs and CFOs who want to have predictable budgets
• DevOps teams that can manage large-scale infrastructure

It will be difficult for a company to find the answer to their problem if their cloud costs are increasing every month but they still don’t have the clarity – in such a situation, FinOps can be no longer be an option but a necessity.

FAQs – Rising Cloud Bills & FinOps

Why do cloud bills increase even when usage stays the same?

Costs increase because of the idling of resources, inefficient pricing, and lack of governance that keep trickling.

How much can FinOps reduce cloud bills?

After adopting FinOps, most organisations are able to achieve 20-40% cost savings within a time frame of 30-90 days.

Is FinOps only for large companies?

Definitely not. FinOps is highly beneficial for startups and SaaS businesses whose cloud costs directly affect their runway and margin.

Does FinOps slow down engineering teams?

On the contrary, FinOps helps to make faster decisions, such that the team is still free to innovate.

Is FinOps a tool or a process?

FinOps can be considered a discipline and an operating model that is facilitated by the use of tools, processes, and team collaborations.

Stop Cloud Cost Surprises Before They Kill Growth

Wondering too why your cloud bills are piling up every month? If so, then the solution is not more cost-cutting but prudent cloud financial management.

Through FinOps, you get:

• Control
• Visibility
• Predictability
• Cloud growth that is ​‍​‌‍​‍‌​‍​‌‍​‍‌sustainable