The one cost event you can plan for
Credit expiry is one of the few cloud cost events you can put on the calendar. Give it ninety days of light prep, in three short steps, and your first paid invoice will say roughly what you expected.
90 days out: know your numbers
Check the billing console for the expiry date and the balance left. The date is usually earlier than you think, so put it on the team calendar.
See whether you can get more credits. Programme limits and eligibility change often enough that it’s worth an hour to check, even if the answer is no.
Work out your real run rate. Pull the last three months of usage and see what the bill would have been without credits. That’s your baseline for everything else.
60 days out: trim, then decide
Clear out the waste before you start paying for it. Finished experiments, unattached volumes, idle instances from earlier phases: it’s easier to clean these up while it’s still free.
Right-size what’s left. Instances chosen during the free period were chosen without price pressure, so check them against actual usage.
Decide whether it’s time to switch providers. Expiry is the one moment when another provider’s credits are genuinely on the table, so check what your setup would cost elsewhere before the default renews. Make the call with your own numbers, then move on.
30 days out: set up for the paid era
Set up budgets and alerts before the first invoice. It takes about twenty minutes across all three providers, with the threshold at 80 per cent.
Wait before signing up for discount plans. Locking in rates based on credit-era usage locks in those patterns, so give it a month or two of real paid usage, then decide.
Let the team know the date. People start paying attention to cost once they know the credits are about to run out.
After the first invoice
Read the invoice line by line and compare it to the run rate you worked out at 90 days. Follow up on anything that doesn’t match. After the first month, let the alerts do the watching.
