A one-afternoon cloud cost audit.

You don’t need a FinOps platform to find the first round of savings. You need an afternoon, read access to billing, and this list.

The nine checks

1. Tags: what share of spend is tagged with an owner and an environment? Untagged spend is unowned spend.
2. Idle resources: unattached volumes, unused IP addresses, old snapshots, load balancers with no targets.
3. Non-production schedules: do development and test environments run nights and weekends?
4. Rightsizing: instances and databases running well under their capacity for weeks.
5. Commitments: steady workloads still paying on-demand prices instead of savings plans or reservations.
6. Storage tiers: data that’s rarely read sitting in the most expensive tier, with no lifecycle rule.
7. Data transfer: traffic between regions and zones, and egress to the internet. Often the surprise line.
8. Logs and metrics: retention periods nobody chose, and debug logging left on.
9. Budgets and alerts: is someone told when spend jumps, before the invoice arrives?

After the afternoon

Write each finding down with an owner and an estimate, fix the safe ones that week, and schedule a monthly 30-minute review. The habit matters more than the first cut.