Cloud bills rarely balloon from one bad decision. They drift upward through a thousand defensible ones — an oversized instance here, a forgotten environment there, a chatty query that quietly 10x'd.
We start with attribution: which service, team, and feature drives which dollar. Most organizations cannot answer this, and you cannot optimize what you cannot see. Tagging and per-feature cost views come first.
Right-sizing and autoscaling to real demand, committing to baseline capacity, killing idle non-production environments off-hours, and fixing the handful of queries responsible for most of the egress and compute. Together these cut one client's spend 40% with zero impact on performance.
The point is not to spend less for its own sake — it is to spend deliberately, so every dollar maps to value.