Reviewed by Mayer Hyman, Payments Specialist | Reviewed for accuracy July 2026
Key Takeaways
- Cloud and SaaS adoption cuts upfront hardware costs, but hidden fees like data egress charges and usage creep can quietly erode those savings.
- Wasted cloud spend climbed to 29% in 2026, the first increase in five years, driven largely by the cost complexity of AI workloads (Flexera).
- For ecommerce merchants specifically, chargeback fees ($15 per case for Shopify merchants) are one of the most overlooked recurring cloud-adjacent costs.
- Smart cloud operators read the fine print on egress, storage tiers, and usage-based pricing before signing, and assign someone to actively monitor spend as usage scales.
The Cloud Looks Cheap Until the Bill Arrives
Cloud and SaaS adoption cuts upfront hardware costs, but hidden fees like data egress charges and usage creep can quietly erode those savings. Finance and operations leaders need to know where those costs hide before they show up on the bill.
The cloud is a hugely tempting prospect for any business. For growing firms, it reduces or eliminates the need for expensive servers, data centers, complex networks, and endless upgrades and management costs.
Using the cloud, companies can adopt low-cost digital productivity, collaboration, finance, and operational SaaS products, going live in hours rather than weeks or months. As the company scales, new teams can be onboarded almost immediately.
But the cloud/SaaS combination, while highly tempting and often essential for companies without large IT budgets, isn’t a total bed of roses. Cloud bill shock is an increasingly common headache for finance and IT management teams.
Many costs aren’t immediately apparent, and with cloud spend continuing to grow as a share of overall IT budgets, that adds up to real money that could otherwise be saved.
The Good, Bad, and Ugly of the Cloud
The cloud is well known as a cost-effective way for businesses to adopt services, storage, and compute power without investing in expensive hardware, cutting capital expenditure and creating a more manageable operating cost.
Those major costs are absorbed by cloud and SaaS providers through their own data centers, which they recoup across thousands or millions of customers through rolling subscriptions. That means providers have every incentive to structure pricing so they capture as much value as possible from usage growth.
Buried in the fine print are concepts like egress costs, the fees to move large amounts of data away from a current provider. That mechanism has cost big technology companies tens of millions of dollars as they’ve tried to manage their growing data footprints.
Overspending is also easy to miss as costs creep up through routine usage growth. As a business grows and the number of users increases, so does the amount of data, bandwidth, instances, virtual systems, applications, premium features, and other line items that add to the bill, especially if no one is specifically assigned to manage those costs.
This isn’t a marginal problem. Wasted cloud spend rose to 29% in 2026, the first increase in five years after a period of steady improvement, driven largely by the cost complexity of scaling AI workloads (Flexera, 2026 State of the Cloud Report). Put simply: nearly a third of what many organizations spend on cloud infrastructure delivers no real value back.
The Power and Peril of Cloud Ecommerce
Companies setting up online and ecommerce stores might find sales booming, with platforms like Shopify making it easy to launch a store. Retailers can integrate into enterprise resource planning (ERP) products like Infor CloudSuite and others to build a coherent, across-the-business sales and marketing approach, with the cloud delivering real value.
But tucked deep in the sales process are costs like chargeback fees, $15 per case for Shopify merchants (Shopify Help Center). When disputes drag out, they also create lasting bad customer sentiment on top of the direct fee.
Chargeback management tools help minimize those costs and keep ecommerce customers happier through faster resolution. Cartis Payments integrates with ERP platforms like CloudSuite to support payment, administration, and subscription workflows, and helps merchants identify chargeback trends early so finance and sales teams can stay ahead of the problem rather than reacting case by case.
Be a Smart Cloud Operator
Before adopting any cloud service, check the fine print of each contract and ask questions anywhere the terms aren’t completely clear. Read every definition carefully, especially around data, storage, transfer, dependencies, and over-provisioning.
Once in the cloud, make sure teams use it efficiently, whatever the ERP or productivity suite in play. Avoid data duplication, ensure only authorized services get used, and delegate cost monitoring and vendor negotiation to an experienced manager or partner as usage and costs rise.
Don’t be afraid of the cloud. It has transformed IT, productivity, and sales for millions of businesses and can do the same for yours. Just don’t treat it as a simple, fixed-fee contract forever, cloud and SaaS providers will keep finding ways to maximize their return as their own costs, energy, property, and infrastructure, continue to rise.
FAQ
What are cloud egress costs and why do they matter?
Egress costs are fees charged for moving data out of a cloud provider’s environment, for example when migrating to a different vendor. They’re often buried in contract fine print and can add up to significant unplanned expense, especially for companies with large data footprints.
How much cloud spend actually goes to waste?
Wasted cloud spend rose to 29% in 2026, the first increase in five years, largely driven by the cost complexity of AI workloads (Flexera, 2026 State of the Cloud Report). That means close to a third of typical cloud spend isn’t delivering proportional value.
How do chargebacks factor into hidden ecommerce cloud costs?
Chargeback fees are a recurring, often underestimated cost of running an ecommerce store in the cloud. Shopify, for example, charges $15 per chargeback case, and disputes that drag out can also damage customer relationships beyond the direct fee.
