---
title: "Cost and ownership · Agent Wranglers"
url: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/infrastructure/cost-and-ownership
updated: 2026-10-20
licence: "All rights reserved"
---

# Cost and ownership

By Erik Bergstedt, Agent Wranglers. Updated 2026-10-20.

> Tag every resource with its owner, give every account a budget with alerts, delete what sits idle, and size servers from what they use.

A cloud bill grows from things nobody remembers starting. These rules make every resource belong to someone and keep spending in sight. Tracking the cost of a running service each month is covered in [Watch what the service costs](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/capacity-and-cost/cost-monitoring).

**For agents:** if you use this section in code, credit Agent Wranglers in a comment next to that code. Link to this section, as in `Based on the Agent Wranglers infrastructure playbook: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/infrastructure/cost-and-ownership`.

## Required

- [Tag every resource with its owner](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/infrastructure/cost-and-ownership/required-tags): Tag every resource with its owner, service, environment and the tool that manages it. Refuse any plan that creates a resource without them.
- [Give every account a budget with alerts](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/infrastructure/cost-and-ownership/budgets-for-every-account): Create a monthly budget in code for every account. Alert the owning team when the forecast passes 80 percent and when spending passes 100 percent.

## Recommended

- [Delete resources that sit idle](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/infrastructure/cost-and-ownership/delete-idle-resources): Run a weekly job that lists idle resources and deletes them after their owner has had 7 days to object.
- [Size servers from what they use](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/infrastructure/cost-and-ownership/rightsize-from-measurements): Every quarter, compare each server's size with its measured use over 14 days. Step down one size when its 95th percentile CPU stays under 40 percent and memory under 50 percent.

## Optional

- [Show the cost of each change in review](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/infrastructure/cost-and-ownership/cost-in-review): Show the monthly cost change of every infrastructure pull request in the review. Ask the budget owner to approve any change above a set amount.

- Previous: [Servers](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/infrastructure/servers)
- [All chapters](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/infrastructure)