7 Cloud Cost Mistakes That Are Burning Your Budget (and How to Fix Them)

Cloud bills have a way of surprising people. What starts as a manageable monthly expense can balloon into a budget crisis within a quarter. After auditing cloud spending for dozens of companies, these are the seven mistakes we see most often.

1. Running Dev/Staging 24/7

Your development and staging environments don't need to run overnight or on weekends. A simple scheduled shutdown saves 65% of those costs immediately. AWS Instance Scheduler and GCP Cloud Scheduler make this trivial.

2. Oversized Instances

Most workloads use less than 40% of their allocated CPU and memory. Right-sizing is the single highest-impact optimization. Use AWS Compute Optimizer or GCP Recommender to identify oversized instances.

3. Ignoring Reserved Instances and Savings Plans

If you have predictable baseline usage, reserved instances or savings plans can cut costs by 30-60% compared to on-demand pricing. Start with a 1-year commitment for workloads you know will persist.