FinOps at design time: I found $3,840/month in avoidable spend before writing a line of Terraform

FinOps is almost entirely retrospective. AWS Cost Explorer tells you what happened last billing cycle. Trusted Advisor tells you which resources are underutilised right now. Cost anomaly alerts fire after the anomaly has already run for hours. Every tool in the standard FinOps stack analyses infrastructure that already exists. Which means by the time any of them are useful, the structural decisions that determine 80% of your architecture's lifetime cost have already been made, deployed, and are