Past the Price Tag: What FinOps Success Really Looks Like
- Shannon
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
When people hear the word FinOps, their minds almost always jump to one thing: savings.
“How much money can we cut from the cloud bill?”
“Where can we shave costs?”
“Why is this so expensive?”
It makes sense. Cloud bills can be intimidating, and the first instinct is to trim them down. The problem is that if cost savings becomes the only story you tell about FinOps, you limit its potential and stall its evolution.
The Savings Trap
In the early stages of FinOps, the wins come quickly.
Shut down idle resources.
Right-size oversized VMs.
Commit to reserved instances or savings plans.
The results are immediate. Costs drop and everyone celebrates.
But this is where the trap lies. If you stop here, you have reduced FinOps to a cost-cutting program. That creates several problems:
Engineers begin to see FinOps as the “cloud police” telling them what they cannot do. I have had customers think of FinOps as akin to Security. That's not a good look!
Leaders assume the work is complete once the easy wins are captured. Far from the case!
Teams spend more energy chasing pennies than creating business value. This can 110% be true!
At some point, the savings plateau. And you cannot cut your way to innovation.
A Real-World Example
I once worked with a company that celebrated an aggressive cost-cutting initiative. They reduced their cloud spend by nearly 25 percent in a single quarter. Leadership cheered, finance was thrilled, and engineers…were less enthusiastic.
A few months later, the company noticed a troubling trend. Product releases were slowing down. Engineers were reluctant to spin up test environments because they feared being called out for “waste.” On top of this, performance issues surfaced because workloads had been aggressively downsized.
The savings were real, but so were the side effects. The business had unintentionally created a culture of fear around cloud usage.
The turning point came when they shifted the conversation. Instead of only asking, “How much did we save?” they started asking, “Are we spending in line with our budgets" and "Does this spend support our goals?”
Dashboards were introduced that showed product teams their cost per application and aligned those numbers with revenue. Suddenly, the discussion changed. Engineers felt trusted again, product owners could defend investments, and finance gained predictability. Savings still happened, but that was no longer the only measure of success.
The Next Step: Visibility and Empowerment
The true strength of FinOps does not come from savings. It comes from visibility, transparency, and behavior change.
Cost Transparency: Everyone should understand not just what is being spent, but why. Finance gets clean reporting, engineers see the cost impact of their design decisions, and product owners understand what it takes to deliver their features. Cloud spend stops being an IT issue and becomes a business conversation.
User Behavior: Every cloud bill reflects daily choices. How you size a VM, how you configure autoscaling, and how long you leave a dev environment running all create financial outcomes. When teams see the impact of those choices in near real time, they adjust naturally without heavy governance.
Visibility Into Budgets: Instead of asking “how much can we cut,” organizations begin asking “are we on track with our budget,” or “is this spend intentional.” This shifts FinOps from reactive firefighting to proactive planning.
Why This Evolution Matters
Savings should be seen as a byproduct, not the mission.
The real goal of FinOps is to help organizations spend smarter, move faster, and make tradeoffs with confidence. Sometimes the right answer is to save, but other times the right answer is to invest more for performance, resilience, or faster time to market.
When FinOps evolves beyond cost cutting, it stops being a back-office exercise. It becomes a boardroom-level capability that enables innovation, growth, and better alignment between technology and business outcomes.
The Bottom Line
Savings will always be part of the story, but they should never be the whole story. If you want FinOps to deliver lasting impact, stop treating it like a coupon book and start using it as a framework for smarter decisions.
Because the truth is simple. You cannot cut your way to growth.