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From rampstack-skills
Audits cloud, SaaS, and infrastructure spend. Cuts costs via elimination, rightsizing, restructuring, and negotiation. Use for monthly/quarterly reviews, budget cuts, or contract renewals.
npx claudepluginhub rampstackco/claude-skills --plugin rampstack-skillsHow this skill is triggered — by the user, by Claude, or both
Slash command
/rampstack-skills:cost-optimizationThe summary Claude sees in its skill listing — used to decide when to auto-load this skill
Audit cloud, SaaS, and infrastructure spend. Cut what's not earning its keep. Rightsize what's oversized. Negotiate what's negotiable. Without breaking what works.
Systematically identifies cloud waste and applies FinOps practices (right-sizing, commitment discounts, spot instances) to reduce spend 20-40% without degrading performance.
Optimize infrastructure and operational costs without sacrificing performance or reliability. Use when managing cloud budgets or improving unit economics.
Analyzes cloud spending and identifies savings opportunities across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Use when rightsizing databases, implementing budgets, or reviewing idle resources.
Share bugs, ideas, or general feedback.
Audit cloud, SaaS, and infrastructure spend. Cut what's not earning its keep. Rightsize what's oversized. Negotiate what's negotiable. Without breaking what works.
incident-response)performance-optimization)vendor-evaluation)Every cost optimization opportunity falls into one of these levers.
Stop paying for things that aren't used.
This is usually the largest opportunity in the first audit. Often 10-30% of spend.
Pay for what you actually use, not what you provisioned for the worst case three years ago.
Rightsizing requires real usage data, not theoretical needs.
Use cheaper structures for the same workload.
The right structure depends on the access pattern. Mismatch costs money.
Pay less for the same thing.
Most enterprise vendors negotiate. Most SaaS vendors don't, except at higher tiers. Consumer-tier services usually don't.
Change the question.
Reframe is the longest-lead lever. Worth thinking about even if not actionable now.
Get monthly costs by service, vendor, and (where possible) team or project.
For cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure): the billing console and cost-explorer tools. For SaaS: each vendor's billing portal, plus an SaaS-management tool if available. For everything else: bank statements and accounting export.
12 months minimum. Trends matter as much as absolute numbers.
Organize spend into categories:
The categories vary by business. The point is: similar costs grouped, easy to compare.
80/20 rule. Usually 20% of vendors account for 80% of spend.
Focus the audit on the top 80%. The long tail can be cleaned up but rarely yields big savings per item.
For each major line item, walk the levers:
| Lever | Question |
|---|---|
| Eliminate | Is it used? Could we stop using it? |
| Rightsize | Are we paying for capacity we don't use? |
| Restructure | Is there a cheaper pricing model or service tier? |
| Negotiate | When was the last renewal? Did we negotiate? |
| Reframe | Is this even the right approach? |
Document the opportunity, the effort, the risk, and the savings estimate.
Plot opportunities on a 2x2:
Quadrants:
Also consider risk:
For each easy-win opportunity:
Easy wins typically include:
For higher-effort opportunities:
pm-spec-writing for the plan)Examples:
Optimization isn't one-time. Costs creep back up.
For vendor contracts up for renewal:
Pre-pandemic, many vendors auto-renewed at increases. Post-pandemic, many are hungry for retention. Ask.
Going forward:
Without policy, costs creep.
Cost-cutting that breaks something. Aggressive rightsizing without testing causes outages. The cost of an outage is usually larger than the savings.
Optimization that takes more time than it saves. A team spends a quarter saving $5K/year. Math doesn't work. Focus on opportunities where savings exceed effort.
Renewal autopilot. Annual renewals go through without review. Calendar them.
No tagging. Cloud spend grows; no one knows whose. Tag everything from day one.
Free tier overruns. "It's on the free tier." Then it's not, and bills surprise. Set alerts on free-tier services.
No environment differentiation. Production-grade staging "to match prod." Costs as much as prod. Often unnecessary.
Untouched legacy. "The old project still runs." Why? Often: nothing actually uses it. Audit and shut down.
Premium tiers for non-premium needs. Enterprise plan because someone wanted a feature that's been since added to lower tiers. Recheck.
Vendor lock-in justifying cost. "We can't switch." That's not a reason to overpay; it's a strategic problem to plan around.
Optimizing the small stuff while ignoring the big stuff. Saving $50/month on tools while $5K/month sits in oversized infrastructure. Top-down first.
Penny-wise, pound-foolish. Cutting a useful tool to save $20/month, then losing hours to manual work. Tools that pay for themselves shouldn't be cut.
No reinvestment. Every dollar saved goes to bottom line; nothing reinvested in upgrades or capacity. Saved costs and improved capability aren't either/or.
A cost optimization document includes:
references/cloud-audit-checklist.md: A practical walkthrough for auditing a cloud account (compute, storage, database, network, monitoring) for waste and rightsizing opportunities.