We ran a full cost audit across two GCP accounts today. What we found was ugly.
The Damage
A single Cloud Run service — slack-coworker — had been crash-looping for two weeks on a bad Postgres password. Cost: $63 in 14 days. Nobody noticed because it was in a separate project with no alerts.
Three orphaned projects from a previous client engagement were still running compute. Another $30/month in pure waste.
An n8n workflow VM we set up for testing but never used in production: $4/month doing absolutely nothing.
The Fix
Two hours of focused cleanup:
- Killed the crash-looping Cloud Run service
- Deleted the 3 orphaned projects
- Deleted the n8n VM
- Migrated all Gemini calls from Pro to Flash (same quality, 80% cheaper)
- Identified Cloud SQL instances to consolidate
Result: $69/month saved on Vertex AI alone. Total projected savings: ~$120/month.
The Lesson
If you're not auditing your cloud spend monthly, you're burning money. Period. The waste accumulates silently. No one gets an alert for "this thing costs $4/month and does nothing."
We built Cloud Pro specifically to catch this. It monitors your infrastructure, flags waste, and tracks every dollar. Because the first step to optimization is visibility.