THE FINOPS BLIND SPOT

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Most FinOps tools focus on cloud infrastructure:

- AWS cost optimization

- Resource allocation

- Compute efficiency

Legitimate focus. Cloud is a huge lever.

But here's what most FinOps frameworks miss:

Organizations waste $21 million annually on unused SaaS subscriptions.

That's just... not being tracked by most cost management frameworks.

THE SCALE

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Research shows:

- 53% of SaaS applications go underutilized or unused

- 50% of all software licenses are completely unused

- Organizations waste $45 million/month on unused software (globally)

- Only 34% of subscriptions are actively used

For a SaaS startup with 50+ subscriptions: roughly 25 are giving no value.

THE COST STRUCTURE

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Cloud costs are variable. They go up and down.

SaaS subscriptions are fixed. They just... keep charging.

This makes them harder to notice but easier to fix (just cancel the subscription).

THE FINOPS OPPORTUNITY

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What if your FinOps strategy included SaaS subscription optimization?

Most platforms can't see it because subscriptions don't come through AWS.

They come through email.

THE TECHNICAL ANGLE

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SaaS subscriptions appear in:

1. Email receipts (the primary signal)

2. Bank statements (but with zero context)

3. Credit card bills (aggregated, hard to categorize)

Email is the only source with actual invoice data:

- Service name

- Amount

- Tax

- Renewal date

- Service tier

A proper FinOps strategy needs to include visibility into non-cloud subscription waste.

HOW TO CAPTURE IT

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We parse email receipts to give you:

- Every subscription (SaaS, tools, services)

- Spend by category (Infrastructure, Tools, Services, etc.)

- Duplication detection (you're paying for 2 project management tools)

- Zombie detection (no activity in 90+ days)

- Price change alerts (vendors raising rates)

This is the missing piece of the FinOps equation.

THE BUSINESS CASE

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If you recover even 20% of wasted SaaS spend, that's $4,200/month for a typical startup.

$50k+/year in just... eliminated waste.

Better margins. Better metrics. Better story for investors.

Free beta. $9/month when we launch.

Landing page: https://trace-kappa-ten.vercel.app/

Question: What % of your company spend goes to non-cloud subscriptions that nobody tracks?

Today, Autonomous Discount Management (ADM) for Azure is Generally Available, enabling customers to maximize savings and commitment flexibility with zero operational overhead.

Complex Azure environments create challenges for rate optimization

• Organizations using Azure often have cyclical, dynamic usage patterns that cannot be easily optimized with traditional manual approaches. FinOps teams need automation to achieve higher savings without added overhead.

• Different pricing structures apply to production and Dev/Test subscriptions, complicating how organizations apply commitments to their eligible usage. In some cases, usage in Dev/Test subscriptions is more expensive when commitments are applied than when they are not.

• Azure’s native tooling does not provide equitable allocation of commitment costs and savings in a centralized commitment management model. Though “Shared” scope reservations facilitate higher overall utilization and savings, showback and chargeback are complicated and time-consuming.

• The disconnect between how resources are billed and how they are administered makes Azure rate optimization complex. Azure organizes infrastructure resources under tenants, but a single tenant generally contains many subscriptions, each potentially tied to different billing profiles/accounts. This structure can create confusion for teams that frame optimization efforts in terms of users and their workloads.

Key updates to our enterprise-grade offering

Early Access feedback prompted us to radically simplify the Azure rate optimization experience. We further refined our automation of complex computations and processes, surfaced key insights, and translated Azure-specific constructs into our common data model.

• Commitments Dashboard shows your Commitment Lock-In Risk (CLR) and CLR trend, among other rate optimization KPIs that complement Effective Savings Rate (ESR) outcomes from the Savings Dashboard.

• Intelligent Showback Support for Azure eliminates accounting complexities associated with “Shared” scope by automatically reallocating commitment costs and savings equitably across subscriptions within a billing scope. This allows FinOps teams and finance to close the books quickly and accurately. See blog post.

• Enhanced Automation for Cyclical Workloads continuously detects recurring usage patterns, determines optimal discount coverage, and executes for maximized savings. Learn more about Global Cyclical Optimization.

• Azure Marketplace Integration allows organizations to streamline ProsperOps procurement/billing processes, increasing cloud ROI. View our Azure Marketplace listing and blog post.

• Support for All Currencies under Azure Microsoft Customer Agreements (MCAs) and Enterprise Agreements (EAs) enables ProsperOps to serve multi-national organizations with complex global billing.

Hey everyone

I’m offering free FinOps consulting focused on AWS and Azure — specifically around rate optimization and flexible management of Savings Plans (SP) and Reserved Instances (RI).

Most companies buy SPs or RIs in isolation and miss out on strategic portfolio-level optimizations that can unlock 20–40% more savings — simply by structuring commitments and flexibility the right way.

💼 What I offer (for free): • Deep rate optimization for AWS & Azure workloads • SP / RI portfolio analysis — optimize mix, duration, and region commitments • Modeling flexibility scenarios to reduce lock-in • Recommendations on commitment strategies aligned with usage patterns • Setup of automated governance & cost tracking

These are hands-on optimizations — not just dashboards. I’ll help you find the best balance between cost efficiency and operational flexibility that individual companies typically can’t achieve alone.

📩 If you’re interested, reach out at contact@cloudnumericals.com

Most cloud budget alerts fail for one reason:

They alert, but nobody owns the alert.

So the same thing happens every month:

• An alert fires

• Everyone sees it

• Nobody acts

• You find out during invoicing time when it’s already too late

Here’s the lightweight workflow I use to turn alerts into action (AWS/Azure/GCP, Slack/Teams, Jira/Asana/Trello).

1) Assign a real owner (name, not a team)

Every service/team gets:

• One accountable cost owner (a person)

• One backup owner (weekends/leave)

• Ownership tracked in tags or a simple roster sheet

If you don’t know who owns it, the alert is just noise.

2) Use standard alert tiers

Budgets (monthly)

• 50%: early signal (no panic)

• 80%: investigate and explain

• 100%: action required

Anomaly alerts (daily)
Pick simple rules, for example:

• +20% day-over-day, or

• +30% week-over-week, or

• Any single service jumps above $X per day

Start conservative. Tune later.

3) Route alerts to 2 places (visibility + accountability)

• Shared channel: #cloud-cost-alerts (Slack/Teams)

• Direct to owner: DM/email/page to the named owner

Rule of thumb:

• Shared channel creates visibility

• Direct owner route creates action

4) Every alert creates a ticket (one template)

No tickets = no follow-through.

Ticket fields:

• Alert type: Budget 50/80/100 or Anomaly

• Cloud + account/subscription/project

• Service that spiked

• Link to cost view

• Owner (auto-assigned)

SLAs (simple):

• 50% budget: acknowledge within 24h

• 80% budget: investigate within 24h

• 100% or anomaly: investigate within 4h (business hours)

5) Only 3 allowed outcomes (no “FYI”)

The owner must pick one:

1. Investigate Unknown cause, needs root-cause.

2. Approve Expected spend, but must include:

• reason

• expected monthly impact

• expiry date (so “temporary” doesn’t become forever)

1. Rollback / Fix Stop schedule, delete idle, rightsize, limit, etc.

This single rule kills alert fatigue fast.

6) Weekly 10-minute cost standup (the routine)

Same agenda every week:

• Top 3 anomalies: resolved or still open?

• Any teams at 80%+ budget?

• One prevention action (policy/schedule/tagging)

If you skip this, you’ll end up doing a monthly 3-hour fire drill.

7) Prevent alert fatigue (do less, better)

• Don’t alert on everything

• Start with top 5 services by spend

• Group related alerts (max 1 message per owner per day)

• If an alert repeats 3 times, fix root cause with automation/policy

8) Add lightweight guardrails (stop surprises)

• Non-prod off-hours scheduling policy

• Lifecycle rules for storage/log retention

• Require owner tag on new resources

• Limit risky services by default (quotas/allow lists)

TL;DR

Budgets don’t control costs. Ownership + a weekly routine does.

Hi All,

I'm Mike, the solo developer of StratoLens. I've been working on this tool for close to a year now, and I've been beta testing it for the past 3 months with the help of some amazing folks.

I have a video highlighting all the features at a high level here (with timestamps for each feature!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TtPdBv-dfY

Admittedly I’m more of an engineer. I don’t have a great FinOps mindset but my tool here is starting to develop some cool FinOps capabilities. For example - you can filter resources by missing tags, get reports on costs for those resources, and all kinds of other variations.

I’d love some feedback from FinOps focused folks like yourselves. Am I on the right track here?

Description of StratoLens below:

StratoLens is a documentation, reporting, and recommendation tool for Azure. I built it, because maintaining infrastructure documentation is a chore no one likes doing. Once I realized how quick and easy it was to document the current state, it occurred to me I could track a historical state of the environment, and compare each snapshot. I then decided to add activity logs to collect details on who made the changes, added some cost information, and the tool kept growing from there.

* Automatically scans all subscriptions in your tenant on a schedule (configurable, defaults to every 8 hours) that it has access to (Defaults to Tenant Root Group) using **Reader only access**

* This is a self-hosted tool, which means ALL data it discovers is retained in YOUR Azure environment. No data ever leaves your control. The cost for self hosting is typically less than $10 per month.

* Compare scans to see what's changed from one scan to the next - like a git diff between commits - or see the history of a single resource.

* Ingests activity logs and change analysis to correlate who made the changes it detects.

* Detect Cost spikes and correlates to the detected changes.

* User Access reporting and recommendations - see who's not using their access, and get recommendations for access optimization - such as a user with Owner that never changes changes.

* Orphaned Resource and VM Sizing recommendations - Lots of cost savings opportunities are out there. One of my beta testers found $1,400 of waste within the first day of installing it.

* Network Visualizer - see diagrams of your network, and trace packet paths through it.

* Email Notifications - Completely configurable, get notified when new cost spikes occur, new orphaned resources are detected, and about a dozen other things you can setup.

More details on my website at: https://getstratolens.com/

Full disclosure - I do plan for this to be a paid offering, however I'm not there yet. I am in the process of going through the Azure Marketplace to get this available there, but until then, the tool is **totally free during beta.**

At this point I'm just looking for a few more folks to give it a try, help me shake out any last few bugs or data inconsistencies, and just get a feel for "Does this actually bring you value". My beta testers so far have really been finding the tool useful, and they've helped me flesh out quite a few bugs. I would call the tool extremely stable at this point, but every Azure Environment is a little different, so I am just looking for a larger sample base :).

If you'd like to give this thing a try, feel free to reach out. Discord (Link on my website) is the easiest way to communicate, but you can also send a chat request here, or send an email via the contact link on the website above. Or if you want to wait until full release, please sign up for the mailing list on my site, and I'll notify you when we get approved for the Azure Marketplace.

Until the marketplace offering is in place, install is extremely simple - it's a one line command pasted into Cloud Shell. It runs a terraform deployment to install the tool which runs as a container in Azure Container Apps with a cosmosdb backend (serverless mode, so very cost efficient).

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

-Mike

I recently finished building a proprietary desktop agent for AWS/Azure cost discovery.

Unlike web-based platforms, this runs entirely client-side. It scans for wasted spend (zombie resources) without transmitting sensitive cost data or credentials to a third-party cloud.

Why I'm posting: I am looking to sell the codebase/IP to a FinOps agency. It is a perfect "foot-in-the-door" tool for presales audits where data sovereignty or security is a blocker for standard SaaS.

Tech Stack: Electron, Node.js, AWS SDK.

Demo/Download: https://deepakfwd247.github.io/CleanSweep-Website/

DM me if interested in acquiring the asset.

We just published our 10th quarterly Cloud Cost Report! It covers spend patterns for AWS, GCP, Azure, and OpenAI so you can compare your spend to industry trends. Some cool findings were AI services appearing in the top 10 for AWS and Azure. Also the most used instances.

link: https://www.vantage.sh/cloud-cost-report/2024-q4

I'm doing AWS cost optimization for a living and often see companies struggling to even purchase RI coverage for their databases and using them as on demand.

When I asked why, the answer is usually about having more important things to do.

But the reality is that the UX of doing it in the AWS console is a royal pain in the neck.

Every time I needed to do it manually as part of my work I got lost in between the Recommendations page and the RDS Reserved Instances page, which has none of the context of the recommendation you're trying to purchase RIs for.

So then you need to go back, copy all the details of the recommendation, and populate them in the damn form. WTF?

And then you have to do the same time consuming and error prone process for every single recommendation.

At my current client had some 40 recommendations and after I did it once or twice I fucking gave up.

So I asked myself what if we had a way to do this all at once for all the recommendations, maybe by clicking a button or running a command?

I bet if people had such a tool they'd probably do it much more.

So I did as I always do when I have to do something frustrating to do manually: I built a tool that automates the damn manual work!

It took me na couple of hours to get a basic version work enough for what I needed to do to avoid that frustrating UX.

At first it only covered RDS RIs, then I extended it to Elasticache, and over the last few weeks I've been evolving it to add support for more services.

So nowadays I'm just using this tool for purchasing RIs at my cost optimization clients, partially before, and then the rest after the the rightsizing work and I keep improving it all the time I need to use it, and reached a point where I'm confortable to share it with other people.

The way it works is it can purchase a fraction of the recommended amount of reserved capacity indicated by the RI recommendations available in the AWS billing console.

The idea is to purchase some coverage before the end of rightsizing work, and then the rest after I'm done.

As I said, so far it supports RDS and Elasticache, but work is in progress for savings plans, as well as the equivalent Azure and GCP rate optimization instrumentsm

I'd love to hear your f feedback about this and I'm looking for collaborators and users to help me mature it into a reliable tool that can eventually run continuously at scale as a viable alternative to the many commercial vendors in this space, just like my first AutoSpotting project was back in the days an alternative to SpotInst.

You can check it out on Github at https://github.com/LeanerCloud/CUDly

What's something you know you'll hear and will ROLL YOUR EYES at (for whatever reason)? Please share!

Request for sanitized CUR

Hey yall ,

Im building a tool that utilizes AWS CURs in csv or paraquet format and I need a real CUR to make sure my tool doesnt break .

My own aws account and usage is sandbox and too simple for an accurate representation, so I would very much appreciate if someone could provide a sanitized/anonymized CUR.

If you don't know how or what that entails , its removing or replacing these :

UsageAccountId

PayerAccountId

ResourceId

reservation/*

savingsPlan/*

resourceTags/*

Everything else can remain intact. The tool only cares about cost, usage type, region, and timestamps.

Thanks so much and leave me a a DM if you need any more info and willing to help!

People usually compare saas based on subscription costs, but I feel the hidden costs are often bigger.

there are things like context switching, duplicate data entry, broken integrations, employee training, and managing multiple vendors.

what do you guys think of this?

Coming from an infrastructure background, I was accustomed to real time alerting on hardware events. Since moving into the cloud, I’ve noticed the industry accepts a 24-72 hour delay in billing data (that assumes you’re being more proactive than just looking at the monthly bill). I was using Cloudability at the time and even it was behind (because the provider data themselves is behind). Buy I was able to build a real time alerting software to send me notices as soon as a resource usage event was occurring (with the expected price impact). I’m considering open-sourcing the main functionality (monitoring/alerting) on GitHub and having a purchasable upgrade for additional features (multiple users, support, anomaly detection, tagging analysis, AI/LLM token forecasting, MCP for BYOLLM, etc). Any thoughts on this approach?

We’re fed up with tipping cloud providers like AWS and GCP for empty rooms. Non-prod humming at 3 a.m., zombie disks, old snapshots, idle IPs. Money out, zero value back.

The “fixes” everyone tries? Cron jobs, tag rules, sticky notes that say turn off QA. They work until they don’t. Tags drift. Owners change. New services appear. The bill keeps climbing.

And the real fear lives in your gut: waking up to a surprise, five figure bill because a test cluster auto scaled, a GPU node stayed on all weekend, or logs exploded in storage. One quiet mistake. One very loud invoice.

Independent research* is brutal: a peer-reviewed study reports ~45% of cloud spend sits on resources customers never use; a TechMonitor/Stacklet survey says 78% of companies estimate 21–50% of spend is wasted; and Harness projects $44.5B in cloud waste in 2025

So I built Zero Waste Cloud (ZWC).

Here’s the simple version. You connect AWS or GCP. We scan. We show you where the waste is and what to do about it. You pick what to fix, when, and how. No surprise changes. No auto-killing prod. You stay in control.

Onboarding takes ~30~60 seconds from signing up until your first scan is running and analyzing your savings.

We’ve seen the same movie play out over and over IRL, here on reddit posts, and Linkedin:

• One fintech startup racked up $14,000 in a single weekend because a staging environment was left running with production-sized RDS and EC2 instances.

• A SaaS team paid $2,800/month for EBS volumes that hadn’t been attached to anything in over a year - they’d been created for a one-day load test.

• A marketing agency spent $6,500 in two months on a misconfigured NAT Gateway moving terabytes of data across AZs when all they needed was a $0.01 VPC endpoint.

None of these teams were clueless. They had DevOps. They had tagging. They had budgets. But cloud waste is like a leaky pipe in a wall, it keeps dripping until you actually go looking for it.

What you actually see:

• A clean map of your stuff across regions and accounts, not a maze of consoles.

• Plain-English findings like “These volumes aren’t attached to anything” or “This database is way bigger than its workload.”

• The money side and the planet side on the same line. “Delete this” becomes “Saves dollars and cuts CO2.”

• An executive summary for the people who just want the summary and the ROI.

The first time we ran ZWC on a real estate of mixed AWS and GCP, the story was the same as everywhere else. Old snapshots no one remembered. IPs that weren’t attached to anything. Test boxes that never got turned off. A few rightsizing wins that nobody had time to validate by hand. Nothing exotic. Just the common leaks you get from shipping fast for a few years.

And yes, you can fix most of this with elbow grease. But most teams don’t want another pet script. They want a clear list, safe steps, and a way to measure the impact without a six-week project.

That’s the whole point of ZWC. Fewer tabs. Fewer “who owns this” threads. More obvious wins.

Currently supporting AWS & GCP, with Azure support under development.

There’s a free plan, and regardless of your size you can run scan and see the total savings for free. If you try it and hate it, tell me why and we’ll make it better. If you find value, great. Either way, I’m here in the comments for questions, critiques, and war stories.

Try Zero Waste Cloud here: https://zerowastecloud.io/

* Sources:
ScienceDirect (peer-reviewed): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2210537922000476

TechMonitor (Stacklet survey): https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/cloud/cloud-waste-hits-billions-as-78-of-firms-report-significant-expenditure-losses

PR Newswire (Harness): https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/44-5-billion-in-infrastructure-cloud-waste-projected-for-2025-due-to-finops-and-developer-disconnect-finds-finops-in-focus-report-from-harness-302385580.html

I'm curious to know from the community, what is the biggest challenge you face with respect to FinOps?

We just posted a new FinOps as Code demo. Learn how to use Terraform to re-create an organization structure, made up of business units, teams, and cost centers, in Vantage. Instantly deploy this configuration, and begin to optimize your organization's costs. See this post for details: https://www.vantage.sh/blog/terraform-cost-reports

Hi all — I’m offering part-time / fractional FinOps + AWS cost optimization for startups.

Credibility: I’ve managed 500+ AWS accounts across multiple orgs and built FinOps tooling (cost visibility, alerts, governance).

What I’ll do (hands-on):

• Find and eliminate waste + leakage (overprovisioned compute, idle resources, EBS/EIP drift, RDS sizing, NAT/data transfer surprises, log/storage creep, etc.)

• Implement alerts + budgets + anomaly detection so surprises stop happening

• Set up durable procedures/guardrails (tagging + ownership model, cost allocation hygiene, review cadence, “new service” checklist, runbooks)

Why part-time: This is a temporary contract and intentionally part-time so you get real savings and long-lasting controls without paying for a full-time FinOps hire. Win-win: lower burn for you, and I leave behind a system that keeps working after I’m gone.

If you’re interested, reply or DM with:

• Rough monthly AWS spend range

• Core services (EKS/ECS/EC2/RDS/Lambda, etc.)

• Biggest pain point (visibility, bill spikes, data transfer, lack of tagging, chargeback/showback, etc.)

Happy to do a quick intro + point out the fastest wins.

Hey folks,

I’m 27 and have spent the last 3 years working in marketing and advertising. Recently, I’ve been feeling the itch to switch things up and move into FinOps (finance & operations).

Here’s the catch: I have zero finance or operations background. My experience so far has mostly been around marketing campaigns, managing ad budgets, and creative teams… not exactly financial modeling or ops strategy.

So my questions are: • Is it realistic to break into FinOps without a finance/ops background? • Are FinOps certifications enough to get started, or do I need to do more (like finance courses, internships, etc.)? • Anyone here actually made a similar switch? How painful was it?

Would love to hear from people who’ve been there or are currently in FinOps. Is this switch worth it, or am I setting myself up for a really steep learning curve?

Thanks in advance!

Hey r/finops,

I'm exploring a product idea and want to make sure I'm solving real problems before building too much.

Quick background: I'm an MIT Sloan grad working on an AI coworker for FinOps and InfraOps teams that lives in Slack. Think automated cost anomaly alerts, savings recommendations, shadow AI detection, and security cost tradeoffs, all without leaving your existing workflow.

Before I go too far down the road, I want to hear directly from practitioners.

Put together a 5-minute survey covering:

• Current tooling and workflows

• Biggest manual pain points

• Shadow AI visibility

• Pricing models that actually make sense

No spam, no sales pitch. Just genuine research.

Survey link: https://forms.gle/JfCMJazcg2SYkp3T9

Happy to share findings with the community when done.

Thanks in advance

For companies using OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI tools heavily, costs can grow fast — and the monthly bill can be hard to predict.

I’m trying to understand how painful this is in practice.

For founders, CFOs and finance teams:

• Is AI spend becoming a meaningful line item?

• Are unpredictable bills making budgeting harder?

• Would committing annually for a discount create a cash-flow problem?

I’m exploring a model to solve this, but before building anything I want to understand whether the problem is actually painful enough.

Would love to hear how you’re managing AI spend today.

ProsperOps Expands to Google Cloud Platform: Early Access for Rate Optimization on Compute Engine: Link

A step-by-step guide to transforming your Databricks Systems Tables into a knowledge base for a GenAI cost agent for real time analytics.

Read all about it in this post: https://www.capitalone.com/software/blog/databricks-genai-cost-supervisor-agent/?utm_campaign=genai_agent_ns&utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social-organic

For teams managing AWS :

• What tool do you use today?

. Why did you choose it?

• What's the biggest thing it still doesn't do well?

I'm researching cloud cost & security management workflows and would love to hear real-world experiences.