Most FinOps tools show you the bill. They don't show you the waste — especially in Snowflake, Databricks, SaaS sprawl, and egress. Here's what they're missing.
Lakshmi Kiranmai Guduru
Founder, CARTIEAI
In the 2024 Flexera State of the Cloud report, organizations admitted that 32% of their cloud spend is wasted.
Stop and think about that. If you spend $10M/year on cloud, $3.2M is going to nothing. Across the global cloud economy ($723B in 2025 per Gartner), that's $231 billion of pure waste sitting on the table every single year.
So why hasn't every FinOps tool fixed this? Because they're showing you the wrong things.
Open Vantage, CloudHealth, or AWS Cost Explorer right now. Here's what you'll see:
Notice what's missing? Action. They show you the what, not the why or the fix.
These data clouds bill in DBUs and credits — units that don't map to traditional FinOps metrics. Your $200K/month Snowflake account shows up as a single line item in Vantage with no breakdown by warehouse, query, or user.
Result: If 35% of your data cloud spend is wasted (and it usually is), no traditional tool flags it.
Untagged resources are the #1 source of "orphan" spend. A forgotten EBS volume from 2022. A snapshot taken before a migration. An idle Elastic IP.
Traditional FinOps tools group these into a "Other" or "Untagged" bucket. They don't tell you what to do with them.
The Flexera report says 55% of cloud users know they over-provision compute. AWS Trusted Advisor will flag the obvious ones, but it misses:
Your "cloud bill" doesn't include SaaS, but SaaS is part of the same wallet. Datadog, Snowflake, MongoDB Atlas, GitHub, Vercel, Sentry, PagerDuty, ChatGPT Enterprise.
FinOps tools rarely cover SaaS. That's a giant blind spot.
A single misconfigured cross-region replication can cost $50K/month. Most FinOps dashboards show egress as a line item but don't trace it back to the offending workload.
For a Series B startup spending $100K/month on cloud + SaaS:
| Waste Category | % | $/month |
|---|---|---|
| Snowflake/Databricks | 12% | $12,000 |
| Idle/orphan resources | 8% | $8,000 |
| Over-provisioned compute | 7% | $7,000 |
| SaaS sprawl | 3% | $3,000 |
| Egress / data transfer | 2% | $2,000 |
| Total waste | 32% | $32,000 |
That's $384,000/year at a Series B. At a public company spending $50M/yr, it's $16M/year.
The next generation of FinOps tools needs to:
It's the difference between a doctor who hands you an X-ray with no diagnosis vs. one who says: "Here's what's wrong, here's the prescription, here's how to take it."
If your Snowflake bill is the biggest blind spot, run our free Snowflake Cost Health Score to find out exactly where you're bleeding.
THE FINOPS BRIEF
Built for finance & engineering teams who are tired of paying for cloud they don't use. No fluff. Just what works.
Unsubscribe anytime. We never sell your data.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Founder, CARTIEAI · Building in public
I'm building CARTIE AI to fix the cloud-cost problem I saw drain millions at companies I worked for — where engineering and finance kept talking past each other. If you liked this post, here's where I share unfiltered notes on building this in public:
