Finops budget

Skill vindreshsingh/engineering-skills/skills/finops-budget

The broadest agent-skills library: 64 behaviorally-tested engineering skills + a 38-role SDLC & marketing org + an orchestrated build loop. Works with Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini, Copilot, Codex.

Install

npx -y skills add vindreshsingh/engineering-skills --skill finops-budget

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Controls cloud and SaaS spend — cost visibility, budgets, alerts, and right-sizing. Use when bills spike, planning infra for a feature, or setting cost guardrails before scale.

SKILL.md

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FinOps Budget

Performance without cost awareness burns runway. This skill makes spend visible, budgeted, and actionable before a surprise invoice — not after.

Pairs with [[observability]] for metrics, [[perf-budget]] for efficiency, [[launch-readiness]] before scale events, and [[data-modeling]] when storage drives cost.

When to Use

Monthly cloud bill review or spike investigation
New feature with infra impact (compute, storage, egress, LLM tokens)
Setting budgets/alerts for prod
Right-sizing over-provisioned resources
Choosing between managed services by cost

Skip for local-only development with no cloud spend.

Process

1. Baseline — know current spend

Top 5 cost drivers (service/SKU)
Cost per environment (prod vs staging)
Trend: last 3 months MoM
Untagged or "unknown" spend percentage

No baseline = no improvement.

2. Attribute cost to product

Tag / dimension	Use
`service` / `team`	Ownership
`environment`	prod vs non-prod
`feature`	New launch tracking

Target: >90% tagged spend.

3. Set budgets and alerts

Monthly budget per env with 50/80/100% alert thresholds
Anomaly detection on daily spend
LLM/API: cost per 1k requests if applicable

Document who gets paged at 100%.

4. Optimize — measure before cutting

Priority order:

Waste — idle resources, orphaned disks, oversized dev clusters
Right-size — CPU/memory after 2 weeks of metrics
Storage — lifecycle policies, compression, archive cold data
Egress — CDN, regional placement, cache ([[caching-strategy]])
Commitments — reserved/savings plans only after stable baseline

5. Feature cost estimate (before build)

For new features document:

Compute delta (requests × duration × price)
Storage delta (GB × retention)
Egress delta
Third-party API (LLM tokens, maps, etc.)
Monthly estimate at 1x, 10x, 100x users

Hand to product-manager if estimate breaks business model.

6. Review cadence

Weekly: anomaly check
Monthly: budget vs actual, top deltas
Quarterly: architecture cost review

Common Rationalizations

"We're too small for FinOps" — Small teams feel bill spikes hardest.
"Staging can mirror prod size" — Staging at 25% spec saves 75% there.
"Reserved instances now" — Wait for 30-day stable usage pattern.

Red Flags

No billing alerts configured
Prod and staging indistinguishable in cost reports
LLM features without token/cost logging
20% untagged spend
Cost discussed only at fundraise time

Verification

Top cost drivers documented
Budgets and alerts configured
Tagging coverage >90% or gap plan owned
Feature cost template used for significant infra changes
Monthly review cadence scheduled