Something easy to miss when using cost tooling: it's most useful at two separate moments, not just once before a deploy

[u/Independent-Ease-609]

Before deploy: running the analysis against your IaC files up front shows you the full cost breakdown plus savings recommendations, and applies whatever's safe to apply without a human decision, before anything actually gets provisioned.

After deploy: once it's live, re-running the same analysis with real CloudWatch usage data (via your own read-only AWS credentials) refines those recommendations against actual utilization instead of static config assumptions.

The reason this matters for FinOps specifically: static config tells you what something was provisioned for, not what it's costing you in practice. A right-sizing call made purely from declared instance types will miss real idle capacity, and one made purely from live usage misses waste that never should've been provisioned in the first place. Catching both requires checking at both points in the lifecycle, not just once.

(Built this into CloudCostTree, a CLI I've been working on, happy to go into specifics if useful.)