2026-08-23·Victor Grenu
Cost Explorer shows spend. It does not find idle AWS.
Cost Explorer, Compute Optimizer, Cost Optimization Hub, and Budgets show AWS spend. They do not name the idle resource. A read-only scan does.
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Field notes from the FinOps trenches.
Notes for the people who own the AWS bill: platform leads, FinOps, CTOs who want a digest they can forward. What Cost Explorer misses. What a read-only scan actually names.
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2026-09-23
The scan forgot the volume we deleted
A new AWS scan only shows what is idle now. The finding ledger keeps each resource until a later complete scan says it cleared. That is how realized savings get counted.
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2026-09-23
The account form dies around account 40
Startup and above can register, configure, and trigger read-only AWS scans from the public API. The IAM role still has to exist in each account before a scan runs.
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2026-08-23
Navi: ask the scan, not the open web
Navi is the unusd.cloud assistant grounded in your latest AWS scan. It ranks remediations, cites resource IDs, and does not change a single resource in your account.
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2026-08-23
A Telegram digest for people who do not live in #finops
unusd.cloud posts the executive AWS cost digest to a Telegram Channel you own. Spend, waste, this week's actions. Per-account scans stay on email, Slack, or Teams.
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2026-08-23
Catch AWS spend drift before the invoice
Month-end AWS bills are late on purpose. unusd.cloud flags spend that breaks your usual pattern, then forecasts end of month and end of year from the same scans.
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2026-08-23
Your Jenkins box does not work weekends. It still bills them.
Dev bastions, CI, and non-prod RDS often sit idle all night and weekend. unusd.cloud flags working-hours AWS resources and estimates what a stop schedule would save.
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2025-06-10
Buy unusd.cloud on AWS Marketplace (one bill, no new vendor)
unusd.cloud is on AWS Marketplace. Subscribe against your existing AWS invoice, skip a new vendor setup, and ask for a private offer when procurement needs it.
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2025-02-03
EKS extended support is a $0.60/hour tax. Plan the upgrade.
AWS EKS extended support is six times standard cluster pricing. RDS, OpenSearch, and ElastiCache have the same trap. How to see it before it hits the bill.
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2024-12-15
The $32 NAT that never shows up in standup
Small AWS charges (NAT, Elastic IPs, snapshots, VPC endpoints) look harmless alone. Across accounts and regions they become the line finance cannot explain.
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2024-09-24
How to find idle AWS resources without living in the CLI
You can hunt idle EC2, RDS, and EBS with CloudWatch and the AWS CLI. You will miss a region. Here are the commands, and why teams stop doing it by hand.
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2024-09-20
More Lambda memory can cost less. Idle Lambda still costs.
Lambda CPU scales with memory, so a bigger function can finish cheaper. That trick does not help functions nobody invokes. How to tell the two apart.
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2023-04-04
AWS bill shock is usually a forgotten account, not a hack
Horror-story AWS bills are real. Most of the ones you can prevent are idle resources and zombie accounts, not account takeovers. How to catch them early.
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2023-04-04
The AWS bill that grew while nobody was looking
Unused AWS resources do not show up in standup. They show up on the invoice. How read-only scans find idle EC2, detached EBS, and forgotten RDS before finance does.
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