The text discusses the challenges and inefficiencies of manually managing cloud costs in a pay-as-you-go model, highlighting the unpredictability and complexity involved in controlling expenses. It identifies issues such as the difficulty of balancing cost and performance, decentralization of spending decisions, and the time-consuming nature of manual management as barriers to effective cost optimization. Automation is proposed as a solution, enabling more efficient management of cloud resources by automatically making intelligent adjustments, thereby reducing costs and engineer workload. Examples of companies like Bud, PlayPlay, and Yotpo illustrate how automation tools like Cast AI can optimize cloud expenses by improving resource utilization, selecting cost-effective computing instances, and adapting to fluctuating demands with autoscaling, ultimately leading to substantial cost savings and operational efficiency.