Reduce infrastructure, cloud, SaaS, vendor, and operational spend without breaking service quality or business goals. Use when the task is to analyze cost drivers, identify waste, prioritize savings actions, improve utilization, compare architectural tradeoffs, or connect spend to unit economics and accountability. Do not use for pure reliability engineering, procurement-law review, or accounting treatment work.
Cut waste without cutting what actually matters.
This skill is for disciplined cost work: making spend visible, locating avoidable inefficiency, sizing savings, exposing tradeoffs, and recommending changes that preserve performance, resilience, and business value.
Use this skill for:
Use this skill when the task needs:
Do not use this skill for:
Before analyzing, identify:
If the dataset is partial, say what conclusions are directional only.
Return outputs such as:
Use tables when helpful: category, issue, evidence, savings range, risk, owner, next step.
Start by segmenting cost into understandable buckets:
Optimization fails when the bill remains a blur.
Look for patterns such as:
Do not call a safety margin “waste” without evidence.
Translate spend into unit terms where possible:
This is where FinOps becomes decision-making instead of invoice archaeology.
Classify recommendations into:
Good cost work is prioritization, not a raw dump of findings.
For each recommendation, note:
Cheap systems that miss SLAs are not optimized.
Recommend mechanisms like:
Sustained savings require behavior change, not one cleanup sprint.
Call out when savings come with costs such as:
The right answer is often “not worth it.” Say so.
A strong result should:
Use prompt.md for analysis posture and tradeoff framing.
Use guides/qa-checklist.md before finalizing.
Use examples/README.md for output patterns.
Use meta/skill.json for boundaries and metadata.