FinOps for Startups · Practical Guide
FinOps for Startups: A Practical Guide (Without the Enterprise Overhead)
The FinOps Foundation's framework is designed for enterprises with dedicated FinOps teams. Most startups don't need it. Here's the 80/20 version that actually moves the needle.
What FinOps Actually Means for Startups
What it is NOT
- ✕A $50K platform tool that visualizes your bill
- ✕A dedicated team of 3 people running sprints
- ✕Enterprise showback/chargeback processes
- ✕FinOps Foundation certification programs
- ✕Quarterly budget review ceremonies
What it IS at startup scale
- Knowing what you spend and why (Cost Explorer + tagging)
- A monthly 30-minute cost review with your tech lead
- Eliminating waste before committing to discounts
- Buying Savings Plans at the right time (after rightsizing)
- Not being surprised by your bill at end of month
The Startup FinOps Stack
Three tools. No third-party platforms required until you're spending €200K+/month.
AWS Cost Explorer
FreeHistorical cost analysis by service, account, tag, and region. Group by tag to see per-team or per-feature costs.
Enable it. It takes 24 hours to activate. Costs nothing.
AWS Budgets
$0.02/day for 2 free budgetsAlerts when you exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) a threshold. Catches surprises before end of month.
Set a monthly budget at 80% of expected spend. Alert to email + Slack via SNS.
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection
FreeML-based anomaly detection that alerts when spend patterns are unusual - e.g., a Lambda function running unexpectedly, a forgotten EC2 instance left on.
Enable for each AWS service. Takes 2 minutes to set up.
5 Quick Wins Every Startup Should Implement in Week 1
These don't require a full audit or a consultant. Do them yourself this week.
15 minutes
Enable Cost Explorer and set up a budget alert
Cost Explorer is free and gives you 13 months of historical data. Set an AWS Budget alert at 80% of your expected monthly spend - this catches anomalies before they become surprises.
2 hours
Implement a basic tagging strategy
Minimum viable tagging: `Environment` (prod/staging/dev), `Team` or `Service`, `Owner`. Without tags, you can't attribute costs to teams or features. Activate these as Cost Allocation Tags in the Billing Console.
1 hour
Audit unattached EBS volumes and idle resources
Run a one-time sweep: unattached EBS volumes, stopped EC2 instances with attached storage, idle load balancers, old snapshots. This is pure waste with no trade-offs.
30 minutes
Create Gateway VPC Endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB
Free to create. Routes traffic from private subnets to S3/DynamoDB without going through NAT Gateway. If you're spending anything on NAT Gateway, this saves money immediately.
30 minutes
Migrate gp2 EBS volumes to gp3
Zero-downtime, zero performance impact. gp3 is 20% cheaper than gp2 and includes 3,000 IOPS baseline for free. This is a Terraform attribute change.
When to Bring in a Consultant vs. DIY
DIY is fine when
- You're spending less than €5K/month on AWS
- You have an engineer who's curious about cost optimization
- The 5 quick wins above haven't been done yet
- Your architecture is simple (one region, basic compute + database)
Bring in a consultant when
- You're spending €10K+/month and the bill keeps growing
- You've done the quick wins and still can't explain the bill
- Engineering team is too busy to do a proper audit
- You need IaC implementation, not a list of recommendations
- Fundraise coming up and investors will ask about unit economics