How to audit your cloud spend without a FinOps tool
Avoid unnecessary spend by using native platform insights and AP data to identify and eliminate wasted SaaS and cloud resources.
Published on 17th August 2026
For five years, IT was slowly winning the war on cloud waste. Tech pros got better at tagging what they built and shutting off what nobody needed. In Flexera’s annual State of the Cloud survey, the estimated share of infrastructure spend going to waste shrank a little every time. That streak ended in 2025. Wasted IaaS and PaaS spend rose to 29%, the first increase in five years. The survey’s authors state that the cost complexity of AI workloads and the introduction of new PaaS offerings may be contributing factors to the overall increase in costs, particularly regarding AI workloads.
If you run IT at a smaller company, you can guess where your share of that waste hides because it never arrived as one approved line item. More likely, this waste accumulated through a departmental software trial that continued beyond its pilot phase and a virtual machine (VM) that was sized for a peak demand that never materialised.
Enterprise teams can put a FinOps platform and a dedicated analyst on this problem. You can get most of the way there with the cost instruments AWS, Microsoft, and Google already built into their consoles, on the infrastructure side and the subscription side alike. If you approach the job the way you approached a telecom bill before renewal—the target is bigger and messier, but you’ll find that the instincts transfer.
Make sense of the cloud bill first
Your cloud provider probably spreads your month across services, regions, and pricing dimensions. Almost none of the line items carry names a department head would recognise. You won’t get anywhere reading it as-is, but all three platforms include a view that translates the raw feed into something you can question.
In AWS, you can do this in Cost Explorer, grouping the month’s spend by service to see where the money concentrates. Azure keeps the equivalent in the cost analysis view inside Cost Management. On Google Cloud, the built-in billing reports chart spend by project, service, SKU, or location. Consider pulling the last full month and sorting by cost, then working down the top 10 entries until you can say what each one is, which workload it serves, and who would notice if it disappeared. (Fair warning, the first sort may produce results that are a bit startling.)
Once you’re done, put anything you can’t explain on the audit list and work from there.
Where infrastructure waste piles up
As with most audits, low-hanging fruit is your friend, so start there. When a VM is deleted, many of its dependencies may remain, resulting in continued charges for those remnants until they are identified. Three kinds show up on almost every bill.
- Unattached storage: Disks are the classic culprit. Those volumes are still there months afterward, attached to nothing and still costing you money.
- Addresses and network leftovers: A reserved public IP with no workload behind it, an idle load balancer, or an orphaned network interface will each appear on the invoice every month until you release it.
- Snapshots from projects long finished: Backups multiply during migrations, and once a cutover succeeds, nobody goes back to prune what it produced. Storage prices per gigabyte look tiny until the gigabytes are three years deep.
You don’t have to hunt any of this down by hand, thankfully. AWS Compute Optimizer includes idle detection that flags unattached EBS volumes and idle instances. On Azure, the community-built Orphaned Resources workbook pulls that whole category into one dashboard. Google Cloud’s idle VM recommendations automatically run and are free of charge.
After removing the dead weight, you should compare what remains with its usage. Lift-and-shift migrations replicate on-premises specifications in the cloud, and since those servers were sized for peak load, the cloud copy inherits capacity that its application barely uses. Cost Explorer’s rightsizing recommendations identify EC2 instances you can down-size or terminate, and Azure Advisor surfaces idle and underutilised resources as well.
One caveat applies to AWS accounts on the basic tier, since Trusted Advisor’s checks require a paid support plan – Compute Optimizer and Cost Explorer are your free lane. For a steady, predictable workload or two, the better destination may be outside the cloud entirely because cloud repatriation has become a live option for exactly that profile.
Whatever you resize, drop one size and watch for a week. An aggressive cut that causes an outage runs the risk of costing the audit its credibility and setting you back.
Your SaaS stack deserves the same scrutiny
Subscription waste is harder to see than anything on the infrastructure side because it spreads across expense reports and departmental cards. The renewal emails go to whoever signed up first, and the inventory itself becomes the hard part.
Spiceworks community @walsash summed up the problem this way: “In a lot of small/mid-sized companies, ‘SaaS management’ basically means someone manually comparing an HR Excel/CSV with user lists in Google Workspace, Slack, etc.” You’ll probably need to build the list from your accounts payable data and card statements before you open a single admin console because the subscriptions IT never heard about won’t show up anywhere else.
- Seats nobody uses: Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index, drawn from its platform data, found license utilisation averaging just 54% of purchased seats. That’s right, nearly half of what companies pay for goes unused. Zylo sells the fix, so you may want to keep that in mind. Additionally, it’s important to mention that the percentage of wasted software spending has increased by one point in Flexera’s statistics, and your own dashboards will provide you with your specific figures. The usage reports in the Microsoft 365 admin center are there to spot who barely uses a service and might not need the license. Google Workspace tracks the same signals in its Apps usage report.
- Pilots on autopilot: Plenty of smaller IT environments have a three-seat pilot auto-renewing on a corporate card with nobody watching, and by year two it can cost more than the tool the team adopted. So, match every recurring software charge in your AP data to a person who’ll claim it. If nobody claims one, it might be because the owner left the company or the tool stopped mattering, and either way you can cancel.
- Two tools doing one job: AI subscriptions are multiplying this problem fastest, between the consumption-driven creep of usage-billed tools and the AI price increases bundled into suites you already own. A BlackFog study reported by Forbes found 49% of workers use AI tools in ways their employer hasn’t approved. As that piece notes, five employees expensing personal $20-a-month ChatGPT accounts spend the same money as one business account with usage controls and audit logs. Getting buy-in for consolidating those accounts shouldn’t be that hard.
Keep the audit from unwinding
At this point, you can bask in the glow of having saved the company some money. That said, everything you cleaned up will come back within a few quarters if the conditions that produced it stay the same. New tools will likely come on board, too. Gartner projects public cloud spending to grow 21.3% in 2026 as AI demand accelerates.
So, consider doing a quarterly repeat of the whole audit. Even a light one will keep the invoice more readable year-round. You can make continual pruning easier by giving every survivor a tag naming its owner and purpose. Budget alerts in AWS Budgets, Azure Cost Management, and the Google Cloud console can then flag mid-month surprises before the bill lands. Subscription renewal dates deserve a calendar of their own, of course.
As you go, total what you cut and take the number to your next budget conversation. You may or may not get to allocate it to other IT priorities in the short term, but it buys you something better in the long term—credibility the next time you ask for what your team needs.
Is your cloud spend skyrocketing?
Hopefully the advice given in this guide will help - but for a bespoke look at how that spend can be brought back to the ground, why not get the experts in?
Get in touchSource
Image Credit
Sompoch Sivakosit via Vecteezy