CIOInsider India Magazine

Deepak is an inspiring leader who leads the creation and implementation of long-term business strategies, advancing the company's mission to deliver top-notch cloud engineering services to organizations worldwide, helping them reach their technological objectives and foster innovation.

When people talk about cloud costs, it usually revolves around compute, storage, and networking. But if you're a startup founder or part of an early-stage tech team, here's a truth bomb: Those numbers on your cloud bill? They're just the tip of the iceberg.
In reality, the real cost of running on the cloud often comes from something much less visible - your own team’s time and energy spent wrangling infrastructure.

Startups adopt the cloud because it’s fast, flexible, and low-cost upfront - industry research says 68 percent startups cite affordability as the top driver. In fintech, 75 percent use it to speed up time-to-market. But once you're past the initial setup, costs shift from infrastructure to the people keeping it running.

Every hour your engineers spend restarting containers, fixing CI pipelines, or debugging autoscalers is an hour not spent building a product. Multiply that across weeks, and you’re looking at a serious opportunity cost.

And when things break , it's never the junior team that jumps in - it's your most experienced engineers. Suddenly, your best talent becomes full-time firefighters.

And while all this is happening, cloud costs continue climbing in the background. Why? Because you're over-provisioning to avoid downtime. You're keeping idle resources running “just in case.” You're not auditing usage regularly because the team is too stretched.

Startups often underestimate cloud operations time by 50–60 percent, and that doesn't even account for the real dollars lost to unused resources, zombie workloads, misconfigured autoscaling, or inefficient architectures.

The result? You're not just burning time. You're burning your budget. And for a startup, that means burning the runway.

5 Hidden Cloud Cost Traps and Smarter Ways to Beat Them
Most startups don't overspend on cloud because they’re careless. They do it because cloud complexity snowballs fast - and what seemed efficient at Series A becomes a budget sinkhole by Series B. Here's a breakdown of 5 often-overlooked cost traps and what you can do about them.

1) You’re Not Paying for the Cloud. You’re Paying for People.
It’s easy to blame AWS or Azure for a rising bill, but often the biggest cost isn't the infra - it’s your team managing it. Engineers spend hours maintaining flaky CI/CD pipelines, provisioning resources

manually, tweaking IAM roles, or debugging failed deployments. This eats into both your budget and product velocity.

What to do:
Automate everything that repeats - from infra provisioning to security checks. Use Infrastructure as Code (IaC), implement developer self-service, and lean into CI/CD pipelines that just work. Automation doesn’t just reduce your headcount pressure - it helps you scale cleanly, even with a lean team.

2) Infra Sprawl - Idles, Zombies and more
Left unchecked, cloud environments accumulate junk - idle VMs, orphaned disks, outdated snapshots, unused IPs. With every team spinning up resources and no one tearing them down, you end up with a slow leak that becomes a flood.

What to do:
Run regular infra audits. Set up resource tagging from day one, enforce lifecycle policies, and schedule automated cleanups. Tools like AWS Trusted Advisor or Azure Advisor can flag underutilized assets - but it’s up to you to act on them. Consider implementing policies that require justification for persistent resources.

3) Scaling Usage, But Not Commitments
Startups often stay on-demand “just in case” - which is great for flexibility but terrible for your budget. As your workloads stabilize, you miss out on Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and volume-based pricing that could slash costs by 30–70%.

What to do:
Once you know your steady-state workloads (databases, core services, etc.), commit to them. Use a mix of Reserved Instances and Savings Plans. Monitor usage trends to commit smartly, and review these commitments quarterly. Partnering with cloud cost optimization experts can also unlock deeper discounts (like EDPs) without the risk of overcommitment.

4) When Moving Data Steals Money

Cloud providers love to tout storage and compute prices, but quietly rake in cash from data transfer. Cross-region traffic, external egress, even inter-AZ chatter - it all adds up. At scale, it can become one of your top 3 spend categories.