FinOps Center evaluates your AWS environment across three dimensions — waste elimination, commitment strategy, and resource modernization — and gives you a single, honest score. Not a dashboard full of numbers. A grade.
Most FinOps tools give you a list of recommendations and a dashboard. Then they leave you to figure out what matters, who owns what, and how fast it should be done.
The Cost Saving Report Card gives FinOps leaders a single view of cloud cost management performance — not just what AWS is recommending, but whether your organisation is responding at the right pace. Grades update daily as your environment changes and as your team acts.
An improving grade is visible proof of progress. A declining grade is an early warning before the next bill lands.
Letter grade D+ with overall score. Weighted average of the three dimensions. Updates daily as recommendations are approved and implemented.
14% eliminated. $623/mo available. $14,847 accumulated waste. 47 pending recommendations averaging 38 days.
42% committed. $1,576/mo available. 26 pending Savings Plan and commitment recommendations.
“Approve All Waste” button for bulk approval of pending Stop the Waste recommendations — with accumulated loss and daily prevention clearly stated.
Every grade has a formula. Every formula is visible. FinOps Center scores you on what's overdue relative to the effort required — not just what's pending.
Measures how much of your confirmed idle and unused spend has been eliminated. Resources with no business value — idle EC2, unattached EBS, unused NAT Gateways — have a 7-day implementation SLA. Score penalises recommendations overdue beyond that threshold.
Score = Savings eliminated ÷ Total waste opportunity7-day implementation SLAMeasures how effectively your team is capturing available commitment discounts — Savings Plans and Reserved Instances. Purchasing at management account level scores more favourably than account-level purchases for the same workload.
Score = Committed savings ÷ Total commitment opportunity14-day SLAMeasures progress on rightsizing, Graviton migration, and generation upgrades. These require engineering effort — SLAs range from 14 days (Low effort) to 60 days (High effort). An F reflects the volume of opportunity, not necessarily negligence.
Score = Implemented savings ÷ Total modernisation opportunity14–60 day SLA by effortOverall = (Waste × 0.40) + (Commit × 0.35) + (Modernize × 0.25)
Waste is weighted highest because it represents unambiguous financial loss with no technical justification.
Accumulated loss is calculated as (monthly savings ÷ 30) × days pending, starting after the effort-adjusted SLA expires. It represents money already lost — not future opportunity.
Scores update daily as recommendations are approved and implemented. Aligned with AWS Well-Architected Cost Optimization best practices.
Most FinOps tools show you a list of recommendations and leave you to figure out what matters. FinOps Center scores your organisation's response to those recommendations — and holds you accountable to a timeline.
Idle instances, unattached volumes, unused NAT Gateways, forgotten snapshots. These are the easiest wins in cloud cost management — and the most damning when left unaddressed. Stop the Waste measures how quickly your team acts on resources that are costing money and delivering nothing.
Reserved Instances and Savings Plans exist because AWS rewards commitment. Buy Smarter measures whether your organisation is taking advantage of the commitment opportunities AWS has identified for your actual usage patterns — at the right account level, in the right sequence.
Rightsizing, Graviton migration, generation upgrades. Modernize measures your team's progress on the engineering investments that compound over time — harder to action, but permanently cheaper when done.
A High-effort rightsizing project pending for 20 days is not the same problem as a VeryLow-effort idle instance pending for 20 days. FinOps Center grades you on what's overdue relative to the effort required — not just what's pending.
| Effort Level | SLA Window | Example |
|---|---|---|
| VeryLow | 7 days | Delete an unattached EBS volume |
| Low | 14 days | Stop an idle EC2 instance |
| Medium | 30 days | Rightsize a workload to a smaller instance |
| High | 60 days | Migrate a fleet to Graviton |
Pending but inside the effort-adjusted window. No grade penalty yet.
Past the SLA. Accumulated loss begins accruing.
Materially impacting your grade. Prioritise immediately.
The result: a grade that's fair, defensible to leadership, and genuinely motivating to the engineers who have to act on it.
Every day a pending recommendation sits unactioned past its expected window, FinOps Center calculates the savings you didn't capture. We call it accumulated loss — not unrealised savings, not potential value. Loss. Because that's what it is.
VeryLow effort · $90/mo · pending 21 days
High effort · $900/mo · pending 21 days
A complex engineering project pending three weeks isn't penalised the same way as a trivial delete action pending three weeks. That's what makes the grading fair — and what makes the accumulated loss number trustworthy enough to put in front of an executive.
Agent Bill answers them — at every level of the hierarchy.
“Why did our overall grade drop this week?”
Your Stop the Waste score fell from 62 to 45. Three high-savings idle EC2 recommendations crossed their SLA on Tuesday. Accumulated loss on those three alone is $1,840 month-to-date. The Platform team owns all three.
Your cost data never leaves. Your governance structure — the approval chains, the budget hierarchy, the role-based access — is what enforces the grade. Not a third-party platform making decisions on your behalf.
FinOps Center deploys in minutes from AWS Marketplace. Your first Report Card appears on the first day of data.