February 3, 2026
It usually starts with a sudden realisation: your cloud bill has hit £250,000 a month, and is steadily increasing.
As a CTO, your first instinct might be to buy a sophisticated enterprise tool to solve the problem. Crucial as the right tools are, your organisational practices will deliver the greatest, most enduring savings, making cost optimisation a continuous process rather than a difficult, one-off intervention.
At Equal Experts, we’ve helped numerous organisations regain control of their cloud spend. Here is our practical guide to fixing your cloud bill, quickly and sustainably.
Why not just buy the tools?
Many organisations fall into the trap of purchasing heavy-duty third-party FinOps tools. These often require privileged permissions, take months to implement via a professional services agreement, and come with a high price tag. Even with a major investment in configuration these tools often fail to deliver the desired levels of financial observability.
Moreover, the major cloud providers (AWS, Azure & GCP) already provide free, native FinOps tools that make it trivially easy to observe the sources of your costs and compare them against defined budgets. If you can’t see the waste using native tools like AWS Cost Explorer or Azure Cost Management, a third-party tool is unlikely to be the silver bullet you’re looking for.
So what can you do to take control of your cloud bill, and do so in a way that won’t need you to repeat the same exercise again next year?
1. Make cloud costs visible
Teams cannot be held accountable for their spend if they can’t easily see it. They should be able to, at a moment’s notice, answer the question: “What are we spending, and where is it going?”
A simple solution to this is to give teams access to your cloud provider FinOps tools, and configure those tools so that they can see the source of costs across your whole cloud estate, or as an absolute minimum, their own costs.
2: Figure out who owns what
Having given teams visibility of cloud spend data, the next step is establishing clear ownership of all cloud resources. This requires owner attribution: a consistent, accurate mechanism to map every cloud resource back to its owning team.
Ideally, attribution should be a mandatory step upon resource creation, but any existing un-owned resources must be tagged retroactively. The mechanism is flexible—you can enforce mandatory, well-governed tagging (e.g., using an Owning-Team or Cost-Centre tag), or structure your cloud environment so each team is responsible for a dedicated AWS Account or Azure Subscription. What’s important is that the system is applied consistently and across all resources.
Achieving high technical alignment—for example, by leveraging your digital platforms to roll out and apply this attribution consistently en-masse—can be a great benefit here. Once this ownership data is in place, teams can immediately use the cloud provider’s native FinOps tools to see what they own, understand their costs, and take ownership of their portion of the bill.
Establishing ownership also allows the implementation of budget governance. Once a resource is mapped to an owner, clear financial guardrails, such as budget limits or caps, can be established. This should be paired with automated actions, like programmatic budget notifications, to alert teams before they hit their limit, preventing runaway costs in the future.
3: Incentivise teams to care
At Equal Experts, we advocate the “You Build It, You Run It” (YBIYRI) philosophy, which places accountability for a service’s run-costs squarely with the team that built it. Rather than top-down mandates, which diminish accountability, YBIYRI encourages teams to consider their cloud spend as a badge of engineering pride.
A little friendly competition can be a good thing too. We’ve worked with teams who have insisted their services were impossible to scale in. However, when we’ve helped clients implement gamified leaderboards, reporting the cost of each service side-by-side, the same teams have often quickly discovered ways to scale in without any service impact. Social proof and peer visibility are often compelling incentives to act.
4: Empower teams to effect change
If a team is beholden to another team to scale their cloud resources, they may adopt a defensive posture, leaving their services unnecessarily over-provisioned. They fear scaling in because they don’t believe they can scale back out quickly enough if traffic spikes.
When teams have the controls they need to scale or manage their own resources themselves, they gain the confidence to scale up instantly and independently, and become comfortable running at lower, more appropriate levels. So empowering teams to effect the necessary changes, allows them to control their costs themselves.
In practical terms this can be achieved by ensuring teams have the necessary permissions to modify their cloud resources. And empowering them to make scaling changes, without having to jump through red tape or unnecessary governance.
Where platforms are involved; consuming teams should be given direct control over the scaling of their workloads, through curated platform capabilities. Additional benefits can be derived from smart platform features, such as ensuring non-production environments automatically scale down or switch off outside of working hours, and providing autoscaling strategies that work out of the box.
5: Don’t provision for events year round
A common pattern we see is teams manually over-provisioning resources ahead of major milestones: Go Live, Black Friday, or annual tax deadlines. While this is a sensible risk-mitigation strategy, the problem comes afterwards: teams forget to scale back down once the event is over.
Encouraging teams to use observability metrics, such as the 4 golden signals, to audit their resources against your last major peak, can reveal immediate opportunities to scale in. If you’re still running at “Black Friday levels” in January, you’re effectively burning money to protect yourself against a ghost.
6: Audit your 3rd-party vendor setups
Check the work of external vendors. We have seen clients left with significant and unnecessary cloud costs because a third-party vendor set up their environment with sub-optimal configuration. A quick audit of vendor-managed configurations can often reveal simple errors that lead to significant and immediate savings.
We recently helped a UK government department achieve significant annual cost savings of nearly £3 million through a Software as a Service (SaaS) optimisation effort. The primary actions that led to these savings included:
7: Avoid over-optimising on cost
Don’t fall into the trap of optimising purely for cost, it is just one axis of a healthy system. A “cheap” system that fails during peak load is more expensive in the long run due to lost revenue and reputation. As we saw when scaling “You Build It, You Run It” at John Lewis, the goal is to balance cost against performance, scale, and resilience.
Conclusion
Controlling cloud spend is not a technology problem; it is a cultural and structural one. It doesn’t require a massive budget or a new department, it requires three things: visibility, empowerment, and the right culture.
Visibility allows teams to understand their spend, empowerment gives them the ability to control it, and creates a culture where cost efficiency is seen as a badge of engineering pride. This creates intrinsic motivation for teams to regularly check their consumption, ensuring that optimisation is a continuous habit, not a heroic one-off effort.
By utilising the free tools already at their fingertips, teams can immediately look for high-impact, low-effort wins—like auditing for unnecessary vendor-managed configurations and aggressively scaling back resources once major business events (like Black Friday) are over.
However, as you pursue efficiency, remember that cost is just one axis of a healthy system; the goal must always be to balance cost against performance, scale, and resilience to avoid a “cheap” system that fails when it matters most.
About the author
Edd’s expertise spans software engineering, technical architecture and high-performing organisational culture. Drawing on experience as the architect of HMRC’s digital tax platform, he provides strategic guidance in complex, multi-team environments.
Edd is passionate about building capabilities from the ground up, prioritizing openness and learning to ensure delivery success is achieved through alignment between culture and code. He shares this experience to engagement teams and clients across the USA, UK, and Europe.
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