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Jun 25, 2026
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Latest Blog<br>Jun 30, 2026
We pay engineers to cut our infra bill
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We pay engineers to cut our infra bill<br>Quentin Rousseau<br>June 30, 2026
One of the Rootly engineers added lifecycle policies to our ECR repositories.. Before that, 95% of them had no cleanup policy. Container image storage was trending from $3K to $7.6K per month. But thanks to that engineers, a few PRs later, we were saving roughly $44K a year.<br>Their reward? A thumbs-up emoji in Slack.<br>This bothered me. Not because the recognition was bad. People genuinely appreciated the work. But the incentive structure was broken. Finding and shipping cost savings requires initiative, cross-team coordination, and real engineering work. It carries risk. And at most companies, it’s treated like volunteer work.<br>The side-quest problem<br>Engineers notice waste constantly. An S3 bucket with no expiration policy. CI pipelines running on oversized instances. NAT gateway costs that nobody’s looked at since the initial setup.<br>Most of the time, nothing happens. The engineer files a ticket, maybe mentions it in a retro, and moves on. The ticket sits in a backlog behind feature work because feature work has deadlines, stakeholders, and OKRs attached to it. Cost optimization has none of those things.<br>The few engineers who do push through, who build the case, write the PR, coordinate the rollout, get a “nice catch” in standup. Maybe a shoutout in the next all-hands. Then they go back to sprint work.<br>The message is clear even if nobody says it out loud: shipping features is real work. Saving money is extra credit.<br>What others have tried<br>The FinOps Foundation found that 40% of organizations say getting engineers to act on cost optimization is their number one FinOps challenge. The industry has answers. None of them felt right for us.<br>Amazon has “Frugality” as a leadership principle and hands out the Door Desk Award for ideas that create significant savings. Cultural, but no cash tied to the savings themselves.<br>Spotify built Cost Insights into Backstage so engineers could see cloud spend in their normal workflow. They cut cloud spend by millions. But the reward is visibility, not a paycheck.<br>GitLab ran a contest with visible team rankings and cut Kubernetes costs by 10%. General Mills launched a monthly “FinOps Allstar” recognition and went from one team caring about costs to twenty.<br>Gamification gets attention. But the next sprint starts, priorities shift, and cost optimization goes back to being a side-quest. We wanted something more durable.<br>We decided to pay people<br>We created a program called Save & Share ....