Your cloud bill doubled last year, so you hired a FinOps consultant. Three months later, you're saving £2,000 monthly on server costs but spending £3,500 on the consultant, monitoring tools, and your team's time managing it all. Sound familiar?
After the major outages and rising costs of 2025, UK SMEs are seeking Cloud Sovereignty, ensuring their data stays within UK borders, and FinOps, active financial management of cloud spend. But here's what nobody tells you: for many small businesses, the cure is becoming worse than the disease.
The £60 Billion FinOps Gold Rush
UK SMEs plan over £60bn in technology investment, with automation among the top three priorities. A huge chunk of this is going straight to FinOps - the practice of optimising cloud spending through dedicated teams, tools, and processes.
FinOps adoption grew by 46% in 2025 as cost governance became a board-level priority. Every consultant, software vendor, and managed service provider is scrambling for their piece of this pie. But are they solving your problem or creating new ones?
The FinOps market is worth billions, not because it always works, but because everyone's desperate to fix their cloud spending problem.
When FinOps Makes Your Problems Worse
Look, we've seen this pattern repeat across dozens of SMEs:
The Over-Optimisation Trap: If you're constantly resizing your provisioned resources to the absolute minimum required to support the workload requirements, you may end up spending more on monitoring and management tools to find that perfectly optimized configuration.
The Tool Sprawl Problem: You start with one cloud cost monitoring tool. Then you add a rightsizing tool. Then a reservation management platform. Before you know it, you're paying £800 monthly for tools to save £500 on infrastructure.
The Time Sink Reality: You end up saving 20% in a year through better resource optimization, but that costs you 40% more in finops and management services to get there.
We worked with a Manchester marketing agency that spent six months implementing FinOps practices. They saved £1,200 monthly on cloud costs but allocated half a developer's time (worth £2,500 monthly) to managing it. The maths doesn't work.
The SME Reality Check
Small organizations need 1–2 dedicated people; enterprises with $50M+ spend require 10–20 person teams. But here's the problem: if you're spending under £5,000 monthly on cloud services, dedicating even one person part-time to FinOps probably isn't worth it.
The FinOps Foundation talks about a "Crawl, Walk, Run" maturity approach, but they assume you should always be moving towards "Run". Sometimes staying at "Crawl" forever is the right business decision.
The Four Signs FinOps Isn't For You
1. Your monthly cloud bill is under £3,000 The overhead of proper cost management exceeds potential savings.
2. Your usage is highly variable If you end up underusing the reserved instances, you still must pay for resources that you didn't need. FinOps loves predictable workloads. If you're a seasonal business or startup with unpredictable growth, optimization becomes gambling.
3. You lack technical resources For organisations that have limited engineering resources whose time is better focused on delivering core-business value, it may make sense to stop here. That "here" is basic cloud hygiene, not full FinOps.
4. You're growing rapidly When you're scaling 50% year-on-year, optimising for yesterday's usage patterns is pointless.
What Works Instead: Lazy FinOps
We call our approach "Lazy FinOps" - the minimum viable cloud cost management that actually saves money:
Monthly 30-Minute Review
Log into your cloud console once monthly. Delete anything obviously unused. No tools, no dashboards, just common sense.
Annual Right-Sizing Day
Once yearly, spend half a day reviewing your biggest instances. A real-world client found 18% of their monthly bill was for detached storage volumes alone. Fix the obvious problems.
Set Billing Alerts
Configure alerts at 80% and 100% of your expected monthly spend. No fancy anomaly detection - just "tell me when this gets expensive".
Reserved Instances for Stable Workloads
If you've run the same database for 12 months, buy a reservation. $500K/month spend with 70% committed at 60% discount saves $210K monthly ($2.5M annually). Scale this down - £500 monthly with 70% committed saves £210 monthly.
The Alternative: Smart Cloud Choices
Instead of optimising poor cloud architecture decisions, make better ones upfront:
Choose boring technology: MySQL over fancy NoSQL databases. Traditional VMs over serverless for predictable workloads. Sometimes boring is 50% cheaper and infinitely more predictable.
Plan for actual usage: Don't architect for Netflix scale when you're serving 100 users. SMEs must demonstrate 24/7 resilience to stay in the supply chain of larger UK and European firms. Instead of a yearly review, our managed services provide support dashboards that map security controls directly to DORA requirements.
Buy annual commitments carefully: Cloud spend optimisation is becoming a board-level priority, and FinOps is increasingly the operating model of choice. By 2026, FinOps will have an even stronger foothold within technology and finance functions. But for SMEs, this often means expensive over-engineering.
The Reality Check
If you're spending more time thinking about cloud costs than serving customers, you've lost the plot. Sometimes paying 20% more for cloud simplicity is the right business decision.
When FinOps Does Make Sense
Don't get us wrong - FinOps works brilliantly for the right businesses:
- Monthly cloud spend over £10,000
- Predictable, well-understood workloads
- Technical team with spare capacity
- Cloud costs directly impacting profitability
FinOps is an integrated and coordinated approach that can reduce the time and cost of cloud migrations by up to 30%, but only if you have the scale and expertise to implement it properly.
The Bottom Line
The FinOps industry wants you to believe cloud cost optimisation is rocket science requiring dedicated teams and expensive tools. For most UK SMEs, it isn't.
I still believe that finops is an essential part of a healthy cloud deployment and operations, but avoidable mistakes end up costing more money than is being saved. Many of these mistakes are not very visible, considering that IT tends to look only at the money saved and not the cost of other things that are part of saving that money.
Before you hire that FinOps consultant or buy that monitoring platform, ask yourself: "Am I solving a cloud cost problem, or am I creating a cloud cost management problem?"
Sometimes the best optimisation is knowing when not to optimise.
Need help deciding whether FinOps is right for your business? We offer practical cloud cost reviews that focus on real savings, not consultant fees. Get in touch for an honest assessment.