Most cloud bills carry 20-30% in avoidable spend - not from one big mistake, but from a long tail of small ones: idle resources, oversized instances, and storage nobody’s cleaned up in years.
The highest-leverage fixes we see across client audits are right-sizing compute based on actual utilization data (not guesses), moving cold storage to lower-cost tiers automatically, using spot/reserved capacity for predictable workloads, and tagging everything so cost is attributable to a team or feature. None of these require a re-architecture - they’re operational discipline, and most teams recover the cost of the audit within the first billing cycle.
