When Shipping Gets Cheap, Deciding Gets Expensive: Guardrails for AI-Era Cloud Costs

We spent a week going through our AI platform's cloud bill. Cloud Run instance-based billing dropped 84%, container image storage dropped 65%. But the numbers aren't the point. When implementation gets cheap, the slowness that used to force you to ask whether something was worth building disappears with it. This is about what replaced that gate: a cost check at merge time, daily visibility, and…