Your Cloud Bill Is On Fire. Here's Why Buying a Savings Plan Won't Save You.

Cloud savings plans and reserved instances, often perceived as solutions to escalating cloud costs, primarily serve to secure predictable revenue for providers, locking customers into fixed commitments without addressing underlying inefficiencies. While savings plans can provide immediate financial relief by reducing monthly bills, they do not eliminate waste caused by overprovisioning, idle resources, and outdated infrastructure usage patterns. The fundamental issue lies in the misalignment of incentives where engineers overprovision to avoid outages, leading to resource wastage that savings plans merely discount, rather than rectify. To truly optimize cloud costs, organizations must first address inefficiencies, right-size their workloads, and understand resource consumption patterns. Effective cloud cost management involves a strategic approach that includes making costs visible, creating feedback loops, and aligning incentives to encourage efficient behavior, rather than relying solely on financial commitments that may mask underlying waste.