cost-optimization

1# Cost Optimization
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3Audit cloud, SaaS, and infrastructure spend. Cut what's not earning its keep. Rightsize what's oversized. Negotiate what's negotiable. Without breaking what works.
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7## When to use
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9- Quarterly or annual cost review
10- Finance flags rising spend
11- Vendor contract renewal coming up
12- Budget cut required
13- New leadership wants the numbers
14- Migrating between providers (cost is part of the case)
15- Audit before scaling significantly (catch waste before it scales)
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17## When NOT to use
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19- Active incident response (use `incident-response`)
20- Performance issues that happen to involve infrastructure (use `performance-optimization`)
21- Vendor evaluation for a new purchase (use `vendor-evaluation`)
22- Personnel or org costs (out of scope for this skill)
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26## Required inputs
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28- Current cost (monthly, ideally for the last 12 months)
29- Cost broken down by service or vendor
30- Inventory of cloud resources (instances, databases, storage, etc.)
31- Inventory of SaaS subscriptions
32- Owners per cost line (who decided to spend this, who uses it)
33- Constraints (compliance, performance, contract terms)
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36 
37## The framework: 5 levers
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39Every cost optimization opportunity falls into one of these levers.
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41### Lever 1: Eliminate
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43Stop paying for things that aren't used.
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45- Idle resources (instances, databases, environments running but unused)
46- Subscriptions where no one logs in
47- Duplicate tools (multiple tools doing the same job)
48- Old projects still incurring cost
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