Migrating to the cloud is an opportunity to achieve new levels of agility, flexibility, and efficiency. However, like any investment, it requires proactive management to ensure the intelligent and sustainable use of resources. Many technical and financial teams face high bills without clarity on which services generated them, how to optimize them, or whether the investment is actually bringing value to the business.
This is where FinOps comes in. This practice aligns technical decisions with financial accountability, enabling teams to collaborate and make more informed decisions about the use and cost of cloud resources.
In this article, we explain how Lessthan3 addresses these challenges and facilitates optimal and collaborative management of cloud spending.
FinOps, a contraction of Finance and DevOps, is a practice that promotes operational financial management of the cloud environment, emphasizing collaboration between teams.
Its goal is clear: to understand, optimize, and control cloud spending without slowing innovation or limiting business operations.
Unlike traditional approaches where budgets were static and centrally managed, in the cloud, resources are dynamic, consumption varies by the second, and expenses can be fragmented across multiple services, regions, or teams.
That is why FinOps brings transparency, shared responsibility, and informed decision-making. It is not about spending less, but about investing better: with real-time visibility and concrete actions. Moreover, FinOps has the power to align business leaders, such as the CFO, with technical roles like the CTO or CIO, fostering a common language that allows for joint evaluation of investment in cloud technologies and services.
The cloud has changed the game, but it has also brought new challenges:
Complex invoices: Prorated services, reserved-use discounts, data transfer charges… Even for experienced users—and especially for DevOps teams—interpreting a cloud bill is not trivial. Often, there is not even full clarity about which services other teams are using, making traceability and spending control even more complicated.
Lack of real-time visibility: Many teams only discover overspending once it has already occurred—or even after it has already been billed and charged. This lack of timely information prevents corrective action before the impact becomes real.
Unowned spending: In environments where multiple teams deploy resources, it is often unclear who is responsible for each part of the consumption, or which project each investment belongs to. This lack of traceability complicates both budget control and informed decision-making.
Inaccurate budgets: Without reliable, segmented data, forecasting is little more than optimistic guessing. Without this solid foundation, it is also very difficult to evaluate ROI, since it is often unclear why and for what certain resources are consumed.
All these issues hinder planning and increase the risk of inefficient or uncontrolled spending.
Based on our expertise and supported by proprietary technology, at Lessthan3 we developed a FinOps platform that acts as an analytical abstraction layer over usage and billing data from the main cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure). Its goal is to translate technical spending into actionable, traceable, and operable information, without the need for constant manual intervention.
Lessthan3 connects to native consumption data sources such as:
AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR)
Azure Cost Management exports
GCP Billing Export via BigQuery
In addition, the platform can integrate other complementary sources such as resource tags, organizational metadata, account/project structures, and external financial data, enabling a more complete and contextualized model of cloud consumption.
From there, it builds a unified, normalized data model that enables multi-cloud reconciliation, segmentation, and logical grouping of resources.
The system automatically validates tagging quality and detects anomalies in cost structure—such as untagged or misclassified resources.
Thanks to our proprietary technology, at Lessthan3 we generate tailored visualizations for each company, supporting internal reporting needs, ROI measurement, and financial planning. Based on the data model, the platform creates real-time customizable dashboards with metrics such as:
Daily/monthly accumulated cost.
Spending projections through end of month.
Cost per functional unit (e.g., per microservice or cluster).
Cost analysis by instance type, reserved vs. on-demand use.
It also allows defining budgets and thresholds with conditional logic, triggering automatic alerts—via Slack, email, or webhook—when deviations are detected. This ensures that both technical leads and financial teams have timely, relevant information to act promptly:
Spending exceeding a team’s assigned budget.
An atypical increase in a specific service (e.g., sudden spike in S3).
Resources that have remained active without traffic or CPU for X hours.
Leveraging insights generated by our platform and our team’s know-how, we actively support clients in identifying continuous improvement opportunities. Based on usage patterns, we issue optimization recommendations with real savings estimates, prioritized by impact and ease of implementation. These include:
Identifying underutilized instances using service metrics like CloudWatch (AWS), Azure Monitor, or GCP Metrics.
Recommending instance type changes, such as moving from M5 to T3 in AWS, from E-series to B-series in Azure, or adjusting the machine family in GCP to better match workload and reduce costs.
Suggesting adoption of Savings Plans or Reserved Instances, with ROI simulations.
Detecting duplicate or unused resources.
The goal is not only to show where unnecessary spending exists but to propose concrete actions and quantify their impact.
Lessthan3 incorporates granular access control through RBAC, with options to:
Limit visibility by team or business unit.
Delegate budget ownership and tracking.
Audit actions and configurations performed within the platform.
All data is stored in isolated environments with encryption in transit and at rest, complying with SOC2 and GDPR.
One of the most powerful features of the FinOps platform is its ability to segment cloud spending flexibly and automatically, without relying solely on correctly applied tags, and with support for complex organizational structures.
The system starts with raw data obtained from cloud providers, where each spending entry contains metadata. From this information, LT3 allows the creation of logical groups using flexible combinations.
This translates into filtering rules that the segmentation engine automatically applies across the expense table. Hierarchies can be defined (e.g., team → unit → department) and applied retroactively to all historical data.
Additionally, the platform detects untagged or misclassified resources and allows fallback policies (e.g., “all resources in account X without a tag go into the ‘unclassified’ group”).
Once groups are defined, each can be assigned:
A monthly, quarterly, or annual budget.
A threshold-based alert policy (e.g., 75%, 90%, 100% of budget).
Hard caps or soft limits (notifications only).
The budget is fed from two sources:
Historical consumption: adjusted to the platform’s internal model.
External inputs (manual or via API): e.g., from an ERP or financial tool.
Each budget is registered as an auditable object, with its goals, assigned owners, and notification rules.
The budget engine can connect via webhooks or REST API to tools such as:
Slack (custom alerts by channel/team).
Jira (automatically create a review ticket when thresholds are exceeded).
Internal reporting or BI tools (Looker, PowerBI, etc.).
This makes the platform not just an observability system but an active component within the financial and operational governance cycle.
Some scenarios where FinOps can make a difference:
A development team deploying temporary test environments can receive alerts when resources exceed their assigned budget, avoiding unnecessary costs without losing agility.
A financial manager can access daily reports segmented by area, detecting trends and enabling proactive—not reactive—adjustments.
A technology leader can use reports to justify investments or make architecture decisions based on cost-benefit and performance.
In all cases, the key lies in moving from data to insight, and from insight to action.
The Lessthan3 platform is designed to be cross-functional, useful for several profiles within an organization:
CFOs and finance teams, who need granular visibility of spending and reliable forecasting.
CTOs and infrastructure leads, seeking operational efficiency without losing control.
DevOps and development teams, who want autonomy, but without unpleasant surprises at month’s end.
Product owners or business unit managers, interested in measuring the profitability of their technology decisions.
The growth of cloud spending is no longer just a technical concern but a strategic one. Managing it intelligently and collaboratively is essential for any organization operating in the cloud.
Adopting a FinOps mindset is not simply about installing a tool. It is a cultural evolution. But having platforms like that of Lessthan3 greatly facilitates this process, providing visibility, structure, and responsiveness.
Because the cloud gives you freedom, but not necessarily control. And that is where FinOps comes in.