The Hidden Cost of "Free" Platform Services
Creating a cost-conscious culture in Platform Engineering
Last month, I sat across from a platform engineering director starting a new role at a major retail company. She'd just been informed that her budget would not be increased to cover the company’s ever growing public cloud costs. "Our developers treat compute like it's free" she said. "They spin up environments without thinking about the costs".
Sound familiar? I've had this conversation dozens of times. Platform teams work hard to abstract away infrastructure complexity, but in making resources feel effortless to consume, an unintended consequence is that developers have lost any connection between their decisions and the costs they generate.
The Psychology of Free Resources
When platform resources feel free, teams over-provision by default. They leave staging environments running indefinitely. They choose premium services for experiments that could run perfectly well on basic infrastructure. They architect systems that are easy to develop but are cost inefficient at scale.
It's not malicious, it's human nature. Without price signals, we lose the feedback loop that naturally moderates consumption. The challenge isn't that engineers don't care about costs; they simply have no mechanism to understand the relationship between their technical choices and financial impact. We've optimised for developer experience but eliminated cost consciousness in the process.
Free Compute Creates Expensive Problems
I witnessed this dynamic play out dramatically at a large US media company. They'd secured substantial capex to build an internal cloud platform; millions invested in servers, storage, and networking to give their development teams fast, reliable compute resources. The promise was simple: product teams could provision what they needed without constraints or delays.
Initially, it worked beautifully. The infrastructure was fast, responsive, and developers loved the experience. But three years later, the story had changed. The Finance team had been progressively reluctant to approve new hardware spend. As utilisation grew and servers became oversubscribed, performance degraded. Provisioning requests started queuing. What had been a competitive advantage became a source of daily frustration and the cloud team were under fire from all directions.
When I asked the CTO about their approach and suggested that an internal cost recharge mechanism is necessary, his response was "IT shouldn't constrain the business” - delivered with conviction, as if it represented enlightened technology leadership.
The dangerous part isn't the aspiration. Nobody wants to hold back innovation, but when we provide platform services for free, we're not eliminating constraints, we're making them invisible until they inevitably explode into crisis points further down the line.
Building an Internal Marketplace
What if your platform worked more like an internal marketplace? If that media company had implemented internal cross-charging, teams working on a new service projected to generate £2M in annual revenue could easily justify paying £50K annually for the compute resources they needed. The cost becomes a line item in their business case, just like staffing costs or external software licenses.
Like any business, cross-charging ensures innovation is backed by solid financial foundations. Teams that can't justify their platform costs need to consider the viability of their project.
While the benefits of internal cross-charging are compelling, the implementation challenges in large enterprises are substantial. Putting cultural change to one side, there are significant operational overheads for developers, platform engineers, as well as legal and finance teams:
Development teams must take on the additional budgeting work, including cost estimations as their project scales or experiences usage fluctuations.
Platform teams must provide timely, accurate and reliable consumption data to consumers - which is often lacking from off-the-shelf software.
Legal and Finance teams must play an integral part in ensuring that any proposed cross-charge mechanism is lawful. This can be particularly challenging where platform teams serve teams across different legal entities or countries.
The most successful implementations I've seen start with simple “t-shirt sized” pricing models, rather than precise usage billing. The key is to recognise that perfect, to-the-penny cost attribution isn't the goal; it’s about creating cost awareness and accountability.
Even imperfect cross-charging systems generate better resource decisions than no financial visibility at all.
Gentle Nudges Can Make a Big Impact
Given the complexities of formal chargeback systems, many organisations find surprisingly good results from simpler “showback” systems that show teams the cost of their consumption to the business, even though they're not directly billed.
Behavioural economists call these "nudges" - gentle design choices that guide better decisions without creating friction.
“Showback” provides cost transparency through dashboards, reports, and interfaces that show teams what their platform usage costs, even though they're not directly billed. It's the middle ground between completely free resources and full financial accountability; teams see the impact of their decisions without the operational overhead of internal billing systems.
Simple examples work best: monthly dashboards that show each teams’ platform spending trends, environment provisioning forms that display "This configuration costs approximately £x per month," or service catalogs that highlight cost-effective alternatives alongside premium options. One customer managed to reduce platform consumption by 42% after analysing server utilisation and suggesting right-sized configurations alongside the estimated cost saving for the company.
The psychology is powerful. When teams can see that their experimental environment costs £500 monthly while sitting idle, they naturally develop cleanup habits. When they discover that premium database instances cost 3x more than standard ones, they start questioning whether every workload truly needs premium performance or implement a caching system.
Showback succeeds because it preserves autonomy while creating awareness. Teams make their own decisions about trade-offs between cost, performance, and convenience, but they're making those decisions with full information rather than blind assumptions about "free" resources.
Beyond Cost Control to Cost Intelligence
Teams that understand the financial impact of their technical decisions make better architectural choices, implement more thoughtful resource management, and collaborate more effectively with business stakeholders.
This approach scales platform engineering in ways that pure technical solutions cannot. When engineers become conscious consumers of platform services, they naturally drive demand toward the most valuable offerings while reducing waste on peripheral resources.
The platform team's role evolves from infrastructure provider to product manager, continuously improving services based on usage patterns, cost feedback, and customer success metrics.
Your Next Steps
If you're seeing platform costs grow faster than platform value, consider starting with simple cost visibility. Create a monthly dashboard that shows platform spending by team or project. Share it widely and observe what questions emerge.
Then ask your teams: "What would change about your platform usage if you could see the cost of each service at the point of provisioning?" Their answers will guide your next moves toward cost-conscious platform culture.
The goal isn't cheaper platform engineering—it's more intentional platform engineering where cost awareness enhances rather than constrains innovation.
This article topic was suggested by the content club set up by the CNCF Platforms Community. Each month we choose a topic and invite anyone to contribute articles, videos, podcasts or commentary. If you enjoyed it, you might also like the follow related articles from other platform engineering practitioners. If you’d like to take part, come visit us on our #content-club Slack channel.
Abz shared the method he follows to bring infrastructure costs down. He highlights that “the real work isn’t just technical - it’s keeping teams aligned on business value, impact, and outcomes”.