The Cloud Bill Nobody Owns

The promise of cloud was that you would pay only for what you use. In practice, many organisations pay for what they forgot to switch off, sized for a peak that never came, at prices nobody negotiated.

The bill arrives in finance. The decisions that drive it are made, one at a time, by engineers. In between, nobody owns it. This article sets out where the money goes, why it keeps growing, and what actually brings it under control.

Spend is rising, and so is waste

• Gartner forecast worldwide public cloud spending of $723 billion in 2025, up 21.5% in a year Gartner.
• In Flexera’s 2026 survey, organisations estimated that 29% of their cloud spend was wasted, up from 27% the year before and the first rise in several years, which Flexera attributes to AI and newer services. 85% said managing cloud spend was a top challenge Flexera.
• The FinOps Foundation’s 2026 survey found that 98% of practitioners now manage AI spending, up from 31% two years earlier FinOps Foundation.

The waste figure is what respondents believe, not a measurement. But when nearly a third of a budget line is thought to be wasted and it is still growing, the problem is not knowledge. It is ownership.

Where the money goes

Datadog’s analysis of its own customers’ cloud accounts gives a sense of where the waste sits. It is vendor research, from customers of Amazon Web Services, but the patterns are familiar to anyone who has looked at a cloud bill line by line Datadog.

• Idle capacity. 83% of container costs were tied to idle resources: clusters bigger than they needed to be, and workloads asking for more than they use.
• Old hardware. 83% of organisations still used previous generations of compute, which typically cost more for the same work, and spent about 17% of their compute budget on them.
• Undiscounted steady load. The share of organisations using commitment discounts fell to 67%, even though most have a baseline that runs all year.

Add the test environments that run all night and every weekend, and storage that nobody remembers creating, and the 29% starts to look plausible.

Why nobody fixes it

Every one of those items is an engineering decision, made by someone who never sees the bill. And the bill, when it arrives, is a single number that finance cannot break down into decisions.

The FinOps Foundation’s approach starts with allocation: tagging and structuring accounts so that every cost belongs to a team, which “identifies who is accountable for the expense incurred”. Then it shows each team its costs, and then it expresses them as unit costs, such as the cost per transaction or per customer FinOps Foundation. A team that can see its cost per transaction rising will act. A team that has never seen its costs will not.

Tools help with this, but they do not do it. The same survey found practitioners most want to be involved before systems are built, through guidance on architecture, rather than cleaning up afterwards FinOps Foundation. The cheapest saving is the one designed in.

A worked example

An organisation spends £1m a year on cloud. These figures are illustrative, but typical of what a review finds.

What we find	Typical saving
Test and development environments running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (£150k): run them in working hours only	£100k
Clusters and servers sized for a peak that never comes: right-size them	£60k–£100k
Older generations of compute: move to current ones	£30k–£50k
Steady baseline paid at on-demand rates: commit to it	£40k–£80k
Old snapshots, backups and storage with no owner: delete them	£10k–£30k
Total	£240k–£360k

That is in line with what organisations themselves estimate they waste. None of it needs a new product. All of it needs someone who owns each line, and a reason to care.

Should you leave the cloud?

Some companies have saved a great deal by moving off public cloud. Dropbox moved most of its storage to its own infrastructure and reported savings of about $75m over two years SEC. 37signals, the company behind Basecamp, cut its annual cloud bill from $3.2m to $1.3m The Register.

Both are special cases: very large, very predictable workloads, run by teams with the skills to operate their own hardware. Surveys showing that most organisations plan to “repatriate” usually mean moving some workloads, not leaving altogether, and most organisations now run a mix: 69% use hybrid cloud Flexera.

The economics of moving are improving. In 2025 the UK Competition and Markets Authority found that charges for moving data out of a provider (“egress fees”) and software licensing terms were making it harder for customers to switch CMA. In March 2026 it announced that Amazon and Microsoft would remove egress fees for UK customers switching provider CMA. That makes the decision about which workloads belong where a real one, workload by workload, rather than a one-way door.

What to do on Monday

1. Give every cost an owner. Tag it, or structure accounts so that every pound belongs to a team.
2. Show each team its costs, monthly, alongside the measure that matters to them.
3. Agree a unit cost for each major service, such as cost per transaction or per customer, and track it.
4. Switch off what is idle. Schedule test environments, and delete what nobody claims.
5. Commit on the baseline only. Use discounts for the steady load, and pay as you go for the rest.
6. Put cost into design reviews, so the next system is cheaper to run before it is built.
7. Review where each workload belongs, now that switching is cheaper.

If your cloud bill keeps rising and nobody can say why, talk to us. We will find out where it goes, and who should own it.

Sources

1. Gartner (2024). Gartner forecasts worldwide public cloud end-user spending to total $723 billion in 2025.
2. Flexera (2026). State of the Cloud report. Vendor research.
3. FinOps Foundation (2026). State of FinOps.
4. Datadog (2024). State of cloud costs. Vendor research.
5. FinOps Foundation. FinOps Framework: chargeback.
6. Dropbox (2018). Form S-1 registration statement. US Securities and Exchange Commission.
7. The Register (2024). 37signals says leaving AWS has cut its cloud bill.
8. Competition and Markets Authority (2025). Cloud services market investigation: summary of final decision.
9. Competition and Markets Authority (2026). CMA announces package of actions on business software and cloud services.