Fintech companies face significant challenges in predicting and managing their operational expenses (opex) due to the dynamic nature of the industry, leading to constant battles for profit margins. Cloud costs are a major contributor to this struggle, as fintechs often experience high barriers to planning, managing, and reporting on cloud costs throughout a project's lifespan and across multiple teams. The key to overcoming these challenges lies in implementing best practices such as building a culture of cloud cost ownership, avoiding cloud waste with automated rightsizing and autoscaling, preventing cloud sprawl with automated resource scheduling, not falling into the trap of reservations or savings plans, and utilizing spot instance automation to cut costs. By adopting these strategies, fintech companies can improve their ability to scale while staying cost-effective, even in the face of unexpected events such as sudden increases in demand or changes in market conditions.