Most CFOs can tell you what they spend on people, rent, or R&D. Ask them about their cloud bill, and the answer often starts with a long pause.
The elasticity that makes the cloud so powerful also makes its costs unpredictable. This means that finance teams are left to track expenses that are constantly fluctuating.
“FinOps works because it bridges two worlds that haven’t always understood each other. It turns complexity into something people can actually act on.”
Éric Pinet,
Unicorne
An AI chatbot that jumps from $4,000 to $47,000 in three months. A development team that “saves” $200 on a database but adds $900 in Lambda costs. An infrastructure audit that reveals 847 orphaned Elastic Block Store volumes quietly draining $2,100 per month.
According to Éric Pinet, President of Unicorne, cloud expenses don’t blow up overnight. They leak.
“A few extra test environments, new analytics features, or an unmonitored storage policy can double a bill before anyone notices,” Pinet said.
The steady leak of costs has pushed more companies to adopt FinOps, a discipline built around making cloud spending understandable. The practice brings finance and engineering teams together to track, forecast, and continuously control an organization’s cloud costs.
“FinOps works because it bridges two worlds that haven’t always understood each other,” Pinet added. “It turns complexity into something people can actually act on.”
How costs get complicated
The cloud is built for speed. It allows teams to deploy new services globally in minutes, scale automatically during peak demand, and continuously experiment to improve their products and systems.
It’s why so many organizations rely on platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run critical systems, and why almost half of all organizations have shifted at least half of their applications onto public clouds.
But every layer of convenience in the cloud also adds a layer of complexity. AWS alone releases new updates daily, and each one comes with potential cost implications that even experienced teams struggle to track.
A new feature may seem minor, like a different storage class, a tweak to a database engine, or an automated logging change. But those small adjustments can alter how workloads are billed.
Cloud-based systems also rely on a web of connected services, and when one changes, the others often follow. An adjustment meant to save money in one area can raise costs in another. And while tools like AWS Cost Explorer show total spend for each service, they don’t show the underlying cause of a change.
“You can’t manage what you can’t see,” Pinet said. “For example, a client with $12,000 in monthly Relational Database Service costs from AWS might only see a summary, without insight into how they can optimize.”
The surge in AI workloads also made ever-changing costs a bigger concern in boardrooms. “AI workloads scale very quickly,” Pinet added. “Without cost visibility, you can’t tell if you’re truly building value or just burning cash.”
Putting FinOps to practice
When FinOps is working, teams know what they’re spending and why. In real time, finance can see how costs shift as new features roll out, and engineering can spot which services are growing faster than expected. Dashboards turn those numbers into something both sides can use, and alerts catch irregularities before they become problems.
The process usually starts small. Early efforts focus on the basics, such as clearing unused resources, setting rules for backups and storage, and reserving capacity for always-on services. Pinet described these steps as the “low-hanging fruit” and quick wins that save money quickly and build confidence.
Once the fundamentals are in place, the work of FinOps goes deeper. Teams begin right-sizing their servers and memory to avoid waste, which can ultimately reduce waste and lead to more long-term savings.
Later on, the attention turns to architecture itself, which means looking at how data is structured, and how pay-as-you-go services are used alongside dedicated infrastructure to keep scaling costs in check.
It’s at this point, Pinet said, that FinOps should feel like a shared habit across the organization. He said teams should be putting the right systems in place for “a culture of shared accountability,” like automated policies, approval workflows, and ongoing training.
“FinOps only succeeds when it’s part of the everyday work,” he added. “It has to be woven into a team’s routines, the same way code reviews or security checks are.”
The payoff
According to Pinet, organizations that master FinOps and use systematic analysis and implementation can cut their cloud costs by over 30 percent.
But reaching FinOps maturity relies on seeing what drives spend, not just what the totals are. That’s the goal of Stable, Unicorne’s AWS cost optimization platform. Stable connects directly to a company’s cloud environment and translates usage data into insights that teams can act upon.
Users describe the impact of Stable as immediate. Damien Demessence, Director of Technology at Montréal-based marketing company 4th Whale, said Stable was “instrumental in consistently helping us save on our AWS bills,” adding that the platform helped his team cut cloud costs by 56 percent.
Alexandre Walsh, Co-Founder and Engineering VP at Québec City-based Nexapp and Axify, reported 23 percent in savings off his total AWS bill in less than a month after using Stable.
Cloud costs will always move, but with FinOps, teams no longer have to manage it blindly. According to Pinet, the companies practicing FinOps are finding that clarity is just as valuable as the savings.
“Good decisions come from good information,” Pinet said. “FinOps gives companies both.”
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If you want to unlock the full potential of your AWS cloud investments and turn FinOps into a true superpower for your organization, contact Unicorne today.
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Growtika.