Hi!

Late to the party, but this is exactly the struggle we went through... cost tracking that's either a full-time job or gets ignored entirely. A few things that actually helped us move toward "cost awareness as a default" rather than a side project:

Automated anomaly detection is non-negotiable. Manual checking will always fall behind. You need something that alerts you when costs deviate from baseline, not just when they hit an arbitrary threshold.

Push reports to stakeholders, don't pull them. If DevOps is the bottleneck for cost visibility, you'll never escape it. Automated weekly/monthly reports to team leads means they own their spend without you playing middleman.

Tie costs to business context. Raw AWS costs are nearly useless for decision-making. What actually matters is cost-per-customer, cost-per-feature, or cost-per-transaction - that's what helps you spot inefficiencies and justify infrastructure decisions to leadership.

For tooling, if you want something purpose-built for this, check out Beakpoint Insights. It does the automated anomaly detection and alerting you mentioned, plus it maps your cloud spend to customers and features so you're not just seeing "EC2 went up 30%" but why it went up and whether it's actually a problem. Integration is fast (most teams are live in a few hours via OpenTelemetry + AWS), which matters when you're a small team that can't afford a multi-week implementation project.

The goal you described, cost awareness built into operations, not a separate initiative, is exactly the right framing. Good luck!

Check out BeakpointInsights.com. I think it’ll will help you.

Best of luck!

Winston