The pains
Estimated savings rarely match the bill
Engineering reports a saved dollar, the AWS bill still shows the same number, the conversation goes nowhere.
No defensible unit economics
Cost per customer comes from a hand-built spreadsheet that gets stale every quarter and breaks every time pricing or product mix changes.
Budgets vs forecast variance is invisible until late
You find out the cloud bill is 12% over budget when finance closes the month, not when the burn started.