The Visibility Paradox
FinOps tools surface idle instances, flag overprovisioned databases, recommend reserved capacity. They work. But they only optimize what's visible. FinOps (Financial Operations for cloud) is the practice of bringing financial accountability to cloud spending. The core limitation: FinOps can only surface costs that providers report as discrete line items - not costs structurally embedded in vendor pricing models.
Flexera found 84% of organizations cite cloud spend as their top challenge. Not security. Not performance. Spend. And 54% of that waste stems from a single cause: lack of visibility.
More than half of cloud waste exists because teams can't see where it's happening.
"Why does it feel impossible to forecast application hosting prices?" one DevOps engineer asked on Reddit. "I have used AWS calculator and it is like another language."
He's not alone.
What FinOps Tools Can't See
FinOps platforms analyze what cloud providers expose. That's not comprehensive.
Untagged resources remain invisible. Industry research shows untagged cloud resources waste up to 30% of spending. Shadow IT bypasses central tracking. Developers spin up services through direct API calls. Once attribution is missed, it stays missed.
AWS Cost Explorer only shows resource-level data for 14 days. Want to understand last quarter's anomalies? The granularity is gone.
Some services bill in abstract "units" where two identical charges represent wildly different workloads. Without direct telemetry, you can't distinguish efficient usage from waste. Azure has 60+ regions with varying prices. Teams describe navigating cloud billing as wading through a "maze of financial information."
And the bills? One survey found cloud storage bills from major providers exceeding 40 pages, "virtually incomprehensible."
The Real Issue
The real issue: you can't verify what you're paying for.
Backblaze found 42% of organizations can only estimate their cost attribution. Over 20% have no idea at all.
Cloud billing is a closed system. The entity generating the charges also generates the data used to validate them. There is no independent attestation layer. Billing, logging, and verification are all controlled by the same vendor. Auditors must trust AWS's infrastructure. Cost Explorer data comes from the provider who generated the charges.
FinOps tools optimize within this vendor-controlled data. They calculate savings from visible waste. They recommend changes to tagged resources. What they can't do: verify the underlying charges independently.
Ninety-five percent of organizations storing more than 250TB in public cloud have encountered surprise charges. Not from new services. Not from usage spikes. From charges they didn't expect, couldn't predict, and couldn't trace.
Flat-Rate Math, Verifiable Storage
A different approach exists: simpler pricing you can verify without trusting the bill.
Akave Cloud charges $14.99/TB/month. Zero egress fees under fair use—no asterisks, no hidden limits. Zero per-request API fees. One number. Verifiable onchain No tiers to decode. No 40-page bills. No abstract billing units.
Here's what that looks like at 100TB with moderate data movement. Assumes standard AWS S3 pricing and retrieval patterns typical of analytics, AI training, and backup workloads:
Flat-rate pricing eliminates complexity at the source. The number you plan is the number you pay.
Akave goes further. Every storage action is logged on onchain proving full data provenance backed by cryptographic proofs. eCID ensures content-addressed integrity - the unique hash proves the data hasn't changed. The unique Proof-of-Data-Posession mechanism proves the data exists and can be retrieved - without trusting the storage provider. Auditors verify independently. They don't trust our logs. They verify the proofs.
Run Your Numbers
Cloud cost visibility isn't a tool problem. It's a pricing model problem.
Akave's calculator takes your storage volume and movement patterns and returns one number. No estimation or hidden multipliers.
Drop in your current usage. No email required. See what flat-rate, verifiable storage looks like for your workload.
If you can't verify cloud costs, you can't control them.
FAQ
Q1: Why do cloud bills keep rising even when storage stays flat?
A: Because storage rates (what providers advertise) are only 30% of the total bill for active workloads. Egress - charged every time data is downloaded, served to users, or moved between services - accounts for the remaining 70%. Azure storage costs $0.018/GB but egress costs $0.087/GB. As workloads grow and serve more data, egress scales faster than storage. FinOps tools report this as normal spend, not waste.
Q2: Why can't FinOps tools identify egress waste?
A: FinOps platforms report costs exactly as cloud providers categorise them. Egress fees are categorised as 'Data Transfer Out' - a service rendered, not an inefficiency. The tool has no basis to flag it as waste because the provider is delivering the service as contracted. The waste is architectural: choosing a provider that charges per GB for data movement rather than a flat-rate model.
Q3: What is the real cost breakdown of a cloud storage bill?
A: For a workload storing 10TB on Azure and serving 5TB to users: storage costs $180/month (30% of bill), egress costs $426.30/month (70% of bill), total $606.30/month. The storage tier is cheap ($0.018/GB). The egress rate ($0.087/GB) is 4.8× higher. On Akave Cloud, the same workload costs approximately $149.90/month - storage only, no egress charge. (Source: Akave comparison blog, January 2026.)
Q4: How do you reduce cloud egress costs in enterprise environments?
A: Three approaches: (1) Architecture review - identify workloads where egress represents over 50% of the bill (analytics, AI training, backup restore testing, external data serving). (2) Caching and CDN - reduces web content egress but has limited impact on large dataset workloads. (3) Migrate to zero-egress storage - for workloads where data movement is frequent and large, moving to a flat-rate provider like Akave Cloud eliminates the cost category entirely rather than reducing it.
Connect with Us
Akave Cloud is an enterprise-grade, distributed and scalable object storage designed for large-scale datasets in AI, analytics, and enterprise pipelines. It offers S3 object compatibility, cryptographic verifiability, immutable audit trails, and SDKs for agentic agents; all with zero egress fees and no vendor lock-in saving up to 80% on storage costs vs. hyperscalers.
Akave Cloud works with a wide ecosystem of partners operating hundreds of petabytes of capacity, enabling deployments across multiple countries and powering sovereign data infrastructure. The stack is also pre-qualified with key enterprise apps such as Snowflake and others.