The short answer: credit expiry is one of the few cloud cost events that arrives on a known date. Ninety days of light preparation means the first paid invoice says exactly what you expected it to say.

90 days out: know your numbers

• Find the exact expiry date and remaining balance. Both live in the billing console, and the date is often earlier than remembered. Put it in the team calendar.

• Check whether more credits are available. Programme limits, investor routes, and eligibility rules change often enough that an hour of checking is worth it, even if the answer is no.

• Establish the real run rate. Pull the last three months of usage and work out what the bill would have been without credits. That figure is your baseline for everything below, and for your runway maths.

60 days out: trim, then decide

• Remove the waste before the meter starts. Finished experiments, unattached volumes, idle instances left over from earlier phases. Cleaning up while it is still free is strictly easier than doing it under a live bill.

• Right-size what remains. Instances chosen during the free period were chosen without price pressure. Check them against actual utilisation.

• Ask the provider question once, properly. Expiry is the one moment when another provider’s startup credits are genuinely on the table, so it is worth seeing what your setup would cost across the market before the default quietly renews itself. This is a single decision to make deliberately, with your own numbers, and then move on from.

30 days out: set up for the paid era

• Switch on budgets and alerts before the first invoice, not after it. Twenty minutes, all three providers, threshold at 80 per cent.

• Hold off on discount plans. Locking in a rate against credit-era usage patterns bakes those patterns in. One or two months of real paid usage first, then decide.

• Tell the team the date. Cost habits start when people know the meter is about to be real.

After the first invoice

Read it line by line, once. Compare it to the run rate you established at 90 days, and chase anything that does not match. From the second month onwards, the alerts carry the watch for you.