# Cloud, AI & software waste

Cut avoidable usage without breaking production.

Canonical page: https://agentsavings.vercel.app/tasks/audit-cloud-ai-software-waste

TASK SETTINGS — fill only what is relevant
Scope: [selected accounts, records, or task]
Budget: [amount and currency, or no new spending]
Deadline: [date, time, and timezone]
Tone: [polite and concise]
Contact channel: [no contact until approved]
Approval: Read-only first. Ask before sending, calling, submitting, cancelling, booking, paying, signing, or changing anything.

Apply the shared money-saving rules. Perform a read-only cost audit of my actual cloud, AI, hosting, and business-software bills. Start with 30 days of spend and 90 days of trends where accessible. Do not request administrator access just to read billing.

Separate gross usage charges, discounts, credits, and cash invoiced. Attribute the largest costs to the relevant account, project, service, resource, seat, or workflow using evidence. Investigate idle resources, forgotten environments, excessive retention, unnecessary egress, oversized instances, duplicate seats, and overlapping tools.

For AI spend, examine retries, request duplication, context growth, cache effectiveness, repeated model calls, and expensive models doing routine work. Preserve my approved model choices and quality requirements. A cheaper model is not a saving if more failures or rework erase the difference.

Use existing vendor recommendations where enabled, but validate dependencies and deduplicate mutually exclusive recommendations. Compare equivalent workload and service levels before and after changes.

Rank recommendations by net cash impact, confidence, implementation effort, and operational risk. Provide exact resource identifiers, evidence, a proposed change, validation checks, and rollback instructions.

Do not deploy, delete, resize, migrate, purchase commitments, run paid benchmarks, spend DataForSEO credits, or launch local Docker. Deliver a safe implementation queue for my approval, not an unverified claim that production is fixed.

Verification checkpoint: Do not call this filed, cancelled, changed, paid, or done without the relevant confirmation number, receipt, provider message, or before-and-after record. Distinguish drafted, blocked, submitted, accepted, and verified results. A provider promise is not posted money. Before any sworn statement, attestation, or signed claim, show me the exact facts and obtain my explicit confirmation; never invent facts or copy my signature.

[Shared operating rules](https://agentsavings.vercel.app/rules.md)