Secrets sprawl, the excessive duplication and mismanagement of sensitive information across cloud environments, can significantly inflate cloud bills and pose security risks, often going unnoticed until costs spike or systems fail. This issue arises from frequent unnecessary API calls, increased storage needs, and the time developers spend managing secrets, as demonstrated by AgentSync, which saw 20-30% of its AWS usage tied to secrets management. To mitigate these costs and streamline operations, companies can centralize secrets in a single platform, limit their lifespan by injecting them at runtime, and implement monitoring to ensure only necessary secrets are accessed by CI/CD jobs. By adopting these strategies, teams can reduce overhead, enhance security, and improve developer productivity, as evidenced by AgentSync's significant cost savings and operational efficiencies after reworking its secrets management approach.