With that model, your cost doesn't change, though. When/if you find you need more resources, you can (if you haven't been doing so) audit existing applications to clear out cruft before you purchase more hardware.
The cost of going through that list often outweighs the cost of the hardware, by a lot.
And in a lot of cases it's hard to find out if a production application can be switched off. Since the cost is typically small for an unused application, I don't know if there are many people willing to risk being wrong
People always say stuff like this, and I just don’t buy it. It’s not that hard to analyze network traffic to see what does and doesn’t have active connections. When you’re relatively certain, shut it off for a week. If no one screams, delete it. If a month later someone is screaming, it’s their own damn fault for having no docs on something idle 90% of the time.
I've done many things that got new data ingested on a monthly basis. So say 29 days out of every month they would be idle.
Is it worth starting and stopping those kind of things? Probably not?
If you turn off a VM running something like that, because you didn't see any traffic for a day. Are you going to explain how you just shut it down to save a few dollars a month? I would very much like to see how that unfolds
And in a lot of cases it's hard to find out if a production application can be switched off. Since the cost is typically small for an unused application, I don't know if there are many people willing to risk being wrong