We just launched something we've been building for a while: a free Cloud Waste Audit for any team spending $50K+/month on AWS.
No sales call. No 47-slide deck. No "let me loop in my account executive."
You give us a Management Account ID. We set up a 5-minute read-only integration. 24 hours later, you get a full waste report in your inbox with actual dollar figures.
Get your free Waste Audit →Here's what's behind it — and why we're giving it away.
After years of digging through cloud bills, we noticed the same waste patterns showing up everywhere. Not sometimes. Every single time. So we built a methodology around it.
We call it the FinOps Fanatics Field Guide — five categories where cloud waste actually hides:
Resources running with no active workload attached. The RDS instance from a cancelled project. The EBS volume from a decommissioned server. The load balancer pointing at nothing.
This is pure waste. No optimization required. Just deletion.
One question — "What's that RDS instance for?" — once saved a company $200K/month. The answer was "Oh, that's from a project we cancelled six months ago." Deleted. $2.4M/year back in the budget.
Ghost Infrastructure is the most satisfying category because the fix is instant: find it, confirm it's unused, delete it.
Instances, databases, and clusters sized for peak load that peaks hit 4% of the time. You're paying for a highway built for rush hour traffic that only happens twice a day for 20 minutes.
Right-sizing is the single highest-ROI move in cloud cost optimization. And almost nobody does it systematically because:
The Oversize Tax is typically 15-25% of compute spend. On a $100K/month bill, that's $180K-$300K/year.
Savings Plans and Reserved Instances bought for workloads that have since changed. Different instance families, different regions, different usage patterns. You're locked into discounts you can't use.
This one's sneaky because the original purchase was smart — someone did the right thing by committing. But infrastructure evolves, and nobody goes back to reconcile the commitments against current reality.
Non-production environments running 24/7 when they're used 8-10 hours a day. Dev, staging, QA, sandbox — all burning money nights, weekends, and holidays.
The math is brutal: an environment that should run 50 hours/week but runs 168 hours/week is wasting 70% of its compute cost. Multiply that across every non-prod environment in the org.
Snapshots, backups, logs, and data transfers that accumulate silently. No one notices because no one's looking — until storage is suddenly 30% of the bill and nobody can explain why.
The worst part: most of this data is never accessed again. It's just sitting there, accruing daily charges, because nobody set a lifecycle policy and nobody has the authority to delete it.
The Waste Audit delivers four things:
The Waste Map — Where your money is going and where it's being wasted, organized by the five Field Guide categories. Your actual numbers, not industry averages. The Dollar Figure — A rough estimate of your total annual waste. Most teams are surprised. It's usually 20-35% of total spend. We've seen as high as 52%. The Prioritized Hit List — What to fix first, second, third. Ordered by effort vs. impact. Some of these you can do tomorrow morning. The Honest Answer — Whether you actually need outside help, or whether your team can handle this with a checklist and a Friday afternoon. We include both options in the report.Because we've done this enough times to know: once you see the number, you can't unsee it.
Some teams get the report and fix everything themselves. Great — that's a win for cloud cost sanity.
Some teams realize they want someone to execute the full Field Guide playbook. That's where we come in.
Either way, you walk away with a clear picture of what's burning money. No pitch. No pressure.
The Field Guide creates urgency that dashboards can't. Dashboards show you data. The Field Guide shows you money you're losing — right now, today, with a dollar figure attached.
1. Fill out the form at finfan.cloud/waste-audit with your AWS Management Account ID 2. 5-minute setup — We send you a simple IAM role guide. Read-only access only. We never touch your infrastructure or application data. 3. 24-hour analysis — Our integration collects cost and usage data. Zero engineering time required after setup. 4. Your report arrives — Waste Map, Dollar Figure, Prioritized Hit List, and Honest Answer. Delivered to your inbox.
That's it. No calls to schedule. No demos to sit through. No "discovery meetings."
Not the right fit if you already have a mature FinOps team, spend under $20K/month (the ROI math doesn't work yet), or want a tool demo. The Field Guide is a practitioner methodology, not software.
We built the Field Guide because dashboards don't save money. Action does.
Every cloud bill has waste buried in it. Most teams know it. Few teams have a systematic way to find all of it.
Now there's no excuse.
Get your free Cloud Waste Audit →
