Cloud spend has a way of creeping up quietly. A few oversized instances here, some forgotten volumes there, and suddenly your bill is double what it should be. Across the projects we manage, these seven tactics consistently recover 30–50% of monthly cloud spend without hurting performance.

1. Rightsize before you optimize anything else

Most workloads are provisioned for peak load that rarely arrives. Use utilization metrics from the last 30 days to downsize over-provisioned instances and databases. This single step often delivers the biggest, fastest savings.

2. Turn off what you are not using

Non-production environments do not need to run 24/7. Schedule dev and staging environments to shut down nights and weekends. Delete unattached storage volumes, old snapshots and idle load balancers.

3. Commit with savings plans and reserved capacity

For steady baseline workloads, one- or three-year savings plans cut compute costs by up to 60–70% versus on-demand pricing. Commit only to your reliable baseline and keep bursts on-demand.

4. Use autoscaling and spot capacity

Autoscaling matches capacity to real demand, so you stop paying for idle servers. For fault-tolerant and batch workloads, spot instances can reduce costs by up to 90%.

5. Tier your storage

Not all data needs premium, instantly-accessible storage. Move infrequently accessed objects to cheaper storage tiers and set lifecycle policies to archive or expire old data automatically.

6. Watch data transfer and egress

Cross-region and internet egress charges are a common hidden cost. Keep chatty services in the same region and availability zone, and put a CDN in front of static assets to cut egress dramatically.

7. Make cost visible with FinOps practices

Tag every resource by team, environment and feature. Set budgets and anomaly alerts so a runaway cost is caught in hours, not at the end of the month. When engineers can see the cost of their choices, efficiency becomes part of the culture.

Start with the 80/20

You do not need to implement all seven at once. Begin with rightsizing and shutting down idle resources — they are low-risk and high-impact — then layer in commitments and FinOps discipline over time.