The 7 cost-bleed patterns we find in every mid-market SaaS cloud audit.
We ran the same diagnostic across audits in aviation, media, travel, and enterprise SaaS. Same 7 patterns. Same wasted spend. Different bills.
- 01 Idle-resource taxonomy: where the unspent compute hides (volumes, snapshots, NAT egress, orphaned ELBs)
- 02 Reserved Instance / Savings Plans coverage gaps: the math behind 30-50% spend leakage
- 03 Cross-AZ data transfer: the silent cost line nobody graphs until it's 6 figures/month
- 04 Environment sprawl: dev/staging/preview environments running on prod-tier instances
- 05 S3 / Blob lifecycle: where storage class transitions die quietly
- 06 Database overprovisioning: RDS/Aurora/CloudSQL right-sizing decision tree
- 07 Observability tax: Datadog / New Relic / Splunk pricing models you signed without reading
Each pattern includes: how to detect it (CLI snippets), how to size the savings, and the political move to actually get it fixed (because the technical fix is usually the easy part).
Engineering teams using the checklist before vendor calls
Annualized savings identified across audits the patterns came from
Senior infrastructure delivery shipping the methodology
The checklist tells you where to look. The audit tells you what to do.
The 7-Sin Checklist is built from the same diagnostic we run in our 14-day 3-Layer X-Ray. If you'd rather skip self-diagnosis and have a senior engineer do the read-only audit for you, qualify in 5 minutes — no calendar booking required.
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