Cloud Costs: How to Stop Your Bill Growing Like Nairobi Traffic
Cloud cost optimisation in Kenya sounds like something only banks and telcos worry about. It is not. Here are the signs your cloud bill has turned into Nairobi traffic:
It was manageable in January and nobody can explain February
There are services on the invoice that no living employee remembers starting
Someone set up a test server in 2023 and it is still running, like a matatu idling at the stage with no passengers
Finance has started sending the IT team emails that begin with "Kindly explain"
If you nodded at two or more, sit down. Pole. A little cost discipline goes a long way, and none of it requires a computer science degree. Let us sort it out.
Why cloud bills creep
The beauty of the cloud is that you pay for what you use. The danger of the cloud is also that you pay for what you use, including things you forgot you were using. With an office server, you paid once and suffered quietly for five years. With the cloud, the meter is always running.
Bills usually grow for boring reasons:
Servers left on overnight and over weekends when nobody needs them
Machines that are far bigger than the work they do, like hiring a lorry to deliver one sack of sukuma
Storage that keeps piling up because nobody ever deletes old backups or files
User licences for staff who left months ago
Add-ons and premium features someone clicked once to try
Step one: find out who is driving
Every cloud resource should have an owner, a person whose name is attached to it and who can answer "do we still need this?" Most cloud platforms let you add labels or tags to resources. Use them. Tag things by department, project or client, so that when the bill arrives you can see that the marketing team's video project accounts for a surprising slice of it.
If nobody claims a resource after a polite email and a less polite reminder, switch it off. If nobody screams within a week, delete it.
Step two: right-size and schedule
Look at how hard your servers are actually working. Many sit mostly idle, waiting for a burst of activity that comes twice a month. Smaller machines often do the job just as well. Development and testing environments rarely need to run at 3am on a Sunday, so schedule them to turn off outside working hours. It is the cloud equivalent of switching off the lights when you leave the office, something your landlord has been begging you to do for years.
Step three: tidy up storage
Storage feels cheap until you have a lot of it. Set rules so that old backups are moved to cheaper, slower storage after a while, and deleted when they are no longer needed for business or legal reasons. Clear out duplicate files and abandoned project folders. Wekesa once found that half his company's storage bill was copies of the same training video, uploaded by every new hire who watched it.
Step four: set alarms before the crash
All major cloud platforms let you set budgets and alerts. Use them. Set an alert at a comfortable level and another at the level where you start sweating. When the first one fires, someone investigates. When the second one fires, someone investigates faster.
For licence based services like email and office suites, run a monthly check: compare the list of paid users against your actual staff list. Anyone who has left gets removed. Anyone who only needs basic features gets a cheaper plan.
Step five: make cloud cost optimisation a habit
Cost control is not a one-off clean-up. It is a short, regular meeting, perhaps fifteen minutes once a month, where someone opens the bill, explains the big movements and agrees what to switch off. Bring chai. Bring the bill. Leave with a list of three things to cut.
Do this consistently and your cloud costs will start moving like the Expressway at 6am: smooth, predictable and slightly smug. Skip it, and you will be back at Globe Roundabout, wondering how you got there and why the bill keeps honking.
Practical tip for this week: open last month's bill, find the three biggest line items and ask who owns each one. If the answer involves a custom system nobody fully understands, our IT and software services include exactly that kind of untangling.